SUZUKI RETURNS TO THE SPORT QUAD WORLD!

— There it was on the front cover of our July 2002 issue. 10 years after the last Quadracer, Suzuki comes back with a 4-stroke version of those famous machines. You can say Honda encouraged this with the introduction of their 400EX a couple of years earlier. It gave the other manufacturers the go ahead to return to the performance quad market they mostly abandoned a decade before.

Instead of an air-cooled, rocker-arm motor like the 400EX, Suzuki went with the latest high-tech design, featuring liquid-cooling and double overhead cams. It made more horsepower than the Honda, yet sold for the same price. The Z400 is still a machine that runs just a notch below the fastest 450s. It deserves a spot in the sport quad hall of fame, and the Dirt Wheels crew remembers well how impressed we were the first time we rode one. You can read about it here.