Offroadmotorcycles.ca is fortunate to have CEC’s fastest rising star, Ben “The Giant Killer” Rego, as a houseguest following his top-ten performance at the Parry Sound Grand Prix. Watching him goof around in our private backyard bike test facility was awe inspiring. Needless to say, we got schooled by the Kitimat, BC, moto-prodigy. On a bone stock (right down to the suspension clickers!) YZ450F Rego did things that would be difficult for an expert on a trials bike. He climbed hills we’ve never been able to climb and made it look easy. The guy rips, and here’s how it looked.

Off-camber logs and trail junk? No sweat for the Giant Killer.

Signing the totem pole at the top of the ‘Mother Hill’ has been a right of passage for the best Niagara area dirt bikers for over 30 years. Rego was jumping off the top of our biggest hill going up and then jumping off the top coming back down, all the while laughing about how easy it was. It was very humbling!

At least sometimes he didn’t make the climbs. Gravity can be a bitch, even to a Giant Killer from Kitimat, BC.

When I asked Rego, “Who taught you to ride?” he responded, “Just me I guess. Well, my dad rides a quad…” The guy simply has natural talent out the Wazoo. If you look closely you’ll also see he is wearing work boots. His post Parry Sound bike checkover amounted to turning the worn out back tire around and replacing a leaky fork seal. This guy is most definitely not a moto-poser. It will be awesome to see him in action again at the Quebec CEC rounds and the Montreal Endurocross!

Rego will try anything and laugh about it. We’ve all heard old-school enduro guys say, “You can’t ride a MX bike in the woods, blah blah blah, a 450 is impossible to ride in tight woods…” They are wrong. They can’t ride them only because they aren’t good enough, or strong enough, to take advantage of the stiff suspension and snappy power…just like us.

It blew our minds to learn the easily-altered EFI settings on Rego’s YZF are even more aggressive than the standard motocross settings. “I like the bike to be really stiff and the motor to really bark,” he says. We stood there scratching our heads, struggling to rethink everything we’ve ever learned about woods riding; the new-school has definitely arrived. Rego has also used his 90+ hour 2010 Y-Zed-F for street drag racing, hill climbing, cross-country, CEC enduro, extreme enduro and motocross without a single tuning change aside from his hot EFI settings. I know, I know. We can’t get our heads around it either.

After a humiliating afternoon of watching Rego make us look silly he put his bike away wet, then took off to get crazy all night in Niagara Falls. Whenever we can drag his over-tired butt out the door we’ll be hitting our local MX track for a play ride session. Stay tuned!