I picked up a new LTR450 a few weeks ago. I don't really have any real good time on it to give a great review but I can say it is by far the most stable quad I have ever been on. My last quad was a Banshee and that was a long time ago but this thing is so wide that you would have to try pretty hard to get it to tip over! It handles incredibly. It does donuts like there is no tomorrow. Lean in a little, turn the bars, poor on the throttle and hang on! You can spin your head off before this thing will flip! I was messing around with it and got myself so dizzy, I thought I was going to fall off the bike.
I have done a few mods to it that really open it up. The bike right of the floor is pretty plugged up. When you remove the spark arrestor and air box cover, you get another 7HP! The air box cover has 2 little hole to breathe though. So little that I can plug them up with my pinky finger and I am a lillt guy! It is recomended that this be done in conjunction with a Yoshimura cherry bomb which is a $40 plug in module that increase the fuel mixture.
1 screw and a $40 plug is all it takes and you gain 20% MORE HP! I think Suzuki wanted made it this way becuase of emissions or liabilty.
When I picked my quad up from the dealer, they already did the above for me which eliminated the fun of wrenching on it. They also had a full Yoshi exhaust system in stock and I had all I could do to keep my self from buying it! The quad sat in my garage for a few days and knowing that the yoshi was sitting on a shelf around the block was killing me so in less than a week of owning the damn thing, I raced down to the shop and brought home the exhaust. So now the bike has the full Yoshi on it as well. I have also added full under carriage skids, Twist throttle, new pro taper style Trail Tech handle bars and clamp, Trail tech HID head lights, GPS, Comp cut 20" Sand Skate paddles on .125 Douglas rims and front razor backs to match. Nerf bars on order.
The only thing realling missing now is a fuel management system. From what i have read, the bike will run lean with the full yoshi system and the air box cover removed. The fuel injection system on the bike does not use an o2 sensor and instead uses a pre programed map. Evidently Suzuki created 2 maps in the stock system and the cherry bomb opens the second map which allows for spark arrestor and air box cover removal. Unfortunately it seems that the cherry box is not enough for a full tuned exhaust. Yoshi says just run a 50/50 mix of pump and race fuel but that will not make the bike run richer but would help with detonation instead. Mine does seem to run good as it is but I really don't want to chance it not to mention that tuning fuel injection is like jetting a bike and a properly jetted bike will make for much better power.
Yoshi as well as a few others are about to release their fuel management systems any day so I hope to have that before my next trip. If not, I will drill some holes in the stock air box cover and put it back on if I need to.
For those of you that are wonding what this quad is like, I will be at Dumont for Easter weekend. It flat out screams. I cant wait to get it to the dunes to really see what it can do! I am sure I will be impressed!