FLY Racing Pants Were the Budget Option
FLY made gear for riders who paid their own entry fees. The pants were cheaper than Fox, cheaper than AXO, and built to take exactly the same beating. Most of them did.
Photo by Martin Pettitt / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Pemulis Water & Power • February 2026
The economics of amateur motocross in the nineties were brutal and simple: entry fees, gas, tires, parts, and gear, in roughly that order of priority. Gear came last because gear didn't make you faster. A fresh top-end rebuild made you faster. New tires made you faster. A jersey from AXO with all-over gelprint graphics made you visible, which is not the same thing. For riders operating on a weekend-warrior budget — which was most of them — FLY Racing existed to solve the gap between what you needed and what you could afford.
FLY pants cost less than Fox or AXO. The construction was straightforward: good stitching, adequate Kevlar, functional stretch panels, none of the premium touches that added thirty dollars to a Fox pant without meaningfully changing how it performed in a thirty-minute moto. FLY gear worked. It wasn't aspirational. It didn't appear in the magazines as often. It appeared at the track constantly, on riders who cared more about making the gate than making the podium look good.
The survival logic for FLY pants is the same as Fox: they were consumable. The ones that exist now in clean condition are the ones that weren't consumed. We have a blue and red pair and a black and grey pair. Both intact, both from the era, both one of one.