Things are happening quickly in the two-stroke world. It’s as if the motorcycle industry is trying to make up for 20 years or so of things not happening very quickly or at all. This is the very first Rieju MR Pro 300i in the U.S. It was uncrated in Texas by the guys at Central Powersports Distributing, then Geoff Aaron hauled it out to California to give us a chance to check it out and ride it. We got to shoot photos and videos of him, and then he handed the bike over to us for a quick test on our local trails.
We understand that Rieju isn’t a brand many riders know, but going forward, it will be small companies like this that give us true innovation on the two-stroke front. Back in the day, Spain was a hotspot of two-stroke development, especially in the trials world. Now, Spain, France, and Italy host a cottage industry where new technology and development thrive.
Rieju is a 90-year-old Spanish company that has recently become successful in hard enduro, SuperEnduro and EnduroCross. How do you pronounce it? Geoff says that even in Spain, they pronounce it differently in different regions. In some parts they give the “J” a French twist as in “Jacques,” and in others, the “J” sounds like an “H” and it becomes “Re-Yay-Who.”
ENOUGH PHONETICS
Regardless of how you say it, the company now makes a very sophisticated two-stroke. It has a brand-new motor with an electronic power valve, a counterbalancer, a diaphragm clutch and throttle-body fuel injection. This isn’t a motor made by anyone else. It’s not a GasGas, KTM, Yamaha or anything other than a Rieju, and it’s been several years in development. There is a connection to the pre-2018 GasGas motorcycles that were manufactured by Torrot in Girona, Spain. When KTM’s parent company Pierer Mobility acquired the GasGas brand, the preexisting off-road models under that name were rebranded as Rieju. Until that point, those guys had only made small-displacement two-strokes for the European market. It was the ultimate jump-start for instant success in the serious off-road world. The bike had a brand-new chassis at the time, although the motor went back almost 20 years. So, this new motor was in the plan from the very start. The frame is more or less unchanged for 2025. You can see it has some KTM influence with the central steel backbone and even a KTM-like layout. The suspension is KYB, the brakes are Nissin and most of the parts are from very familiar European sources. It’s still manufactured in that same plant that originally made GasGas off-road bikes, although there is a new Rieju factory in the works.
This particular bike is the MR Pro 300i, which is the top of the line. It has a number of upgrades, like a radiator fan, Xtrig triple clamps, premium suspension components and various extras. It sells for $11,399, whereas the standard model is $1000 less.
RIDE QUICKLY, RIDE HARD
The first thing that hits you when you ride the new bike is how refined it is. There’s very little vibration, very little engine noise, it starts easily, runs crisply and everything feels very mainstream. The clutch has a super-light pull with an excellent feel. If Honda was going to get back into the two-stroke business, this is how we imagine their bikes would feel. It’s simply not what you expect when you’re dealing with such a small company. We already knew that the chassis was very good from our previous experiences with last year’s MR Pro 300. It has a very spread-out riding position, so it’s comfortable, especially for big riders. It’s a very stable bike, especially against a backdrop of other current dirt bikes that have an increasing amount of Supercross influence. By the same token, it’s easy to manhandle in tight terrain because it’s very narrow and the steering is light. It is still a little heavy, though. On our scale, it weighs 245 pounds without fuel. That’s what it was last year, so the new motor didn’t add anything, and some of that weight can be attributed to the extra equipment on the Pro edition. The KYB suspension is set up for hard off-road riding or racing at an aggressive clip. We rode mostly tight trails in first and second gear, where it felt firm overall, but not at all harsh.
THE ENGINE OF CHANGE
All that we expected, but it’s the new motor that turned out to be the real surprise. It’s outstanding. It has three maps available on the handlebar, and in the most aggressive mode (one flash of the LED light), it has great power from bottom to top. Obviously, being a European 300cc two-stroke brings certain expectations. It has to run well down low and be extremely reluctant to stall. Job done in that department. You can lug the bike down to idle, and then whack open the throttle, and the motor responds without complaint. The power delivery is smooth and immediate, but not perfectly linear. It runs like a trials bike on the very bottom with that instant torque, then gets a second wind on top, where it runs like a two-stroke MX bike. In terms of outright power, it is softer on top than a new KTM 300SX, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The 300SX is a beast by anyone’s standards. It will hang with any other 300cc two-stroke we can think of.
There are two other maps available on the handlebar, and they mostly affect performance from the middle to the top. Presumably, the ECU is altering power-valve operation as well as spark advance and fuel mixture. In the mildest map, the power valve doesn’t use its full throw, although the exact details are vague at this time. We know that software exists to alter those parameters, but we don’t yet know how accessible it will be for the end user.
We only had access to the 300i for a short time, but it left us wanting more. It seems like the world as a whole is rediscovering the 300 two-stroke, and this particular bike is so well executed that it makes us optimistic about the direction of dirt bikes in general.
