“You’ll be fine. It’s a bike with training wheels,” offered my friend and colleague, Jeff Henson, on the 2026 Yamaha YFZ450R sport quad. Words of encouragement delivered ahead of a press event where Yamaha would seat me on a 450cc-powered sport quad and send me dancing across the eastern Oregon desert. “You should be more scared that you might like it,” Henson continued.
But fear of falling in love wasn’t really the issue, more that I might not walk away from this ride, literally.
