This is my personal Honda fl250 which I bought for several hundred dollars my senior summer of high school and slowly pieced back together into a fully operational machine.

My obsession with single seat buggies dates back to when I was a kid playing with RC cars (Tamiya knockoffs, etc.). Buggies such as the orange Bob Maynard racing Chenoweth ssr race car come to mind. Already knowing of the existence of crosskarts, I wanted something that could scratch the itch of bouncing one deep in a roll cage while I designed and built mine, so naturally I gravitated towards the old Honda buggies. Pilots are extremely expensive so those were out of the question. Fl350’s were a lot less expensive but were still several thousand dollars over what I had to comfortably spend on a “toy”. This led me to the 250’s. Luckily for me, the 250’s had a rich history in the early 80s rooted in racing, meaning that some parts were still around. I just had to find them.

Upon finally tearing into the car, I found that an aftermarket starter unit had been retrofitted to the engine, however the wiring harness was a rats nest of mismatched gauge cables and random connections which seemed like they’d short out on eachother. This led me to dive into the world of building wiring harnesses and making things less sketchy. The engine itself had almost no compression at all. Tearing it apart revealed why (previous owner had attempted using RTV as a head gasket, in addition to the crank seals being shot and the entire thing needing a complete rebuild anyway. I took the engine apart and over to LA sleeve in Whittier in order to have it bored out slightly. A Wosner piston kit, seals, and new crank bearings took care of the rest.

The chassis itself was rusted but not to the point of being scrap so I left it as it was. I did however strip everything off of it in order to clean and service whatever needed it -which was kind of everything. Things such as the J arms were seized to the bushings but a torch and mallet fixed issues like the such. Due to the original seat literally falling apart upon removing it (rusted pan), I needed a new seat. Luckily I had a (really uncomfortable) plastic bucket seat laying around. Fitting it required notching some of the frame (which I gusseted) and fabricating an entire new seat mount from scratch. To address the lack of the harness, I found an auction for an out of date (but still new in box) PRP 5 point harness). I won it for 1/3 the price of a new unit. I did all of this in the span of a single night before shipping out to SEMA a week before I was to race,

The roll cage is a Triple EEE unit built sometime in the mid 80’s from the limited info I was able to dig up on forums and online. I found it several hundred miles up north in dirty, but somewhat decent condition to be used. It was mounted to my first chassis after some tweaking and rust prevention. I later modified it by adding a fuel tank mount, along with tabbing for quarter turn fasteners (for a roof panel), and proper SFI rated quick release window nets.

Other modifications include stealing the hubs and wheels off of my ‘01 400ex (little known fact: Most honda hubs and splines are interchangeable for some reason). Every nut and bolt on the car was replaced with grade 8 or better from my local mom/pop hardware store. The carb had been swapped for one off of a later Kx100 (rebuilt and rejetted), and bushings were replaced with more solid units to eliminate flex on the engine mount.

I eventually had the chance to race it at Glen Helen’s (Formerly) GBC short course track. This was a bit of a dream come true because I had always wanted to get into some form of wheel-wheel racing with a personal machine. The fact that it was on an offroad short course track (that hosted other events I had spectated) made it even better. Through doing this, I got a lot of opportunities to get feedback and tune the machine to the track which helped since I honestly had no clue what I was doing (outside of the drivers seat). In addition to this, the blue Fl250 that I had powertrain swapped ran that day and did surprisingly well considering it had a harbor freight 224cc engine (with several basic mods and a new CVT). To sum things up, it was a great experience because I was able to enjoy a machine I had saved from death, got to witness another one perform extremely well (it was spanking 10 thousand dollar full suspended trophy karts haha), and got to meet great people.

Future plans include building a set of nerf bars (a side collision with another car almost intruded into my seat), along with potentially an independent suspension setup and some chassis reinforcement in areas that were not supported to my liking from factory.

T