Arizona’s Droog Moto has quickly established their own rough-and-ready style, building post-apocalyptic desert sleds that put the “wild” back in the Wild West. Now the husband/wife team of Max and Erica Droog is back with a slight departure from their knobby-tired norm: a Yamaha FZ09 street tracker/fighter/hooligan machine nicknamed the “Street Sled.” This is one of their personal street bikes, and it looks like a three-bore blast of fun.
The Yamaha FZ-09 (MT-09 outside of North America) makes a great platform for such a build. It has a 115-hp inline triple, and we all know that there is something inherently sexy about three cylinders instead of two or four. Cycle World ranked the bike the “Best Standard of 2015,” and Roland Sands based his incredible RSD Wasp on the platform. Even Yamaha themselves launched a Sport Tracker edition for the Euro market — a sort of MT-09 street tracker.
Below, we get the full scoop from Droog Moto on this genre-busting build.
Droog Moto FZ-09 Tracker: In the Builder’s Words
We’ve had this FZ-09 for a while now. It has come and gone through a few different changes but finally, finally it is what we are after! A tall, burly machine that is equipped and ready to decimate through any type of wasteland. The FZ is known for being a lightweight, torquey and pretty nimble ride, so we thought hell, why not take all these great characteristics and apply a little “Droog Moto” to it!
The first thing we did was strip down the stock fuel tank. There was a bunch of plastic covering the tank that covered it’s unique panel design, which had to go. Once that was all removed we de-tabbed and cut back some of the metal and gave it our signature finish. Over time it has aged perfectly with a nuclear, the end is upon us type of look. It’s perfect!
The stock subframe was ditched and we built up a new one that is much shorter and conceals all of the bikes main electronics. Along with this came a new seat that sits at a nice 38 inches thanks to the 2” rear lift. The front forks received new Progressive springs and some more internal tuning.
We ripped off the old headlight assembly along with all the miscellaneous tabs and clutter and fabricated a raw steel tracker influenced plate. This plate has 4 insanely bright LED pod lights. The rear lighting is in the hoop and is also all LED.
Being that we wanted to ride this bike on and off road we chose Continental TKC80 tires and they simply kick ass. They are really smooth while riding on road but off road they perform really well too. We also fabricated aluminum wheel inserts to give this bike that extra “edge” we were after.
This FZ in person is huge, a lot of people online think it’s a Honda Grom which is hilarious as it is roughly two Groms tall in height. We have ridden this bike on a few single track trails and the tires do great along with all the additional work done to this bike.
The new suspension helps a ton in soaking up rough terrain and is also amazing for daily city riding. The new 1 1/8” handlebars and Biltwell grips are another nice feature we’ve done to the bike to aid in rider comfort.
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