What: Jacob Smith’s GHR Honda CRF450X Rallye
When: February 2001, Issue No. 377
Purpose: Aussie-built Dakar bike
How Much: $38,000 plus labour
Adam Riemann was the lucky bloke who got to test this bike, a desert sled masterpiece fettled by Glenn Hoffman Racing for Jacob Smith’s run in the Dakar Rally, using all the experience they had collected building Australian Safari and Finke Desert Race winners. The list of modifications and changes to the CRF450 takes some reading and included a twin headlight assembly of 10/800 and 45/800 lumens, three front guard-mounted aerials for the GPS, Sentinel tracking and Iridium phone, suspension work, a bashplate holding three litres of water, billet engine covers, different pegs, a cush drive, low exhaust, a long-range tank plus a rear tank/subframe, a nav tower with map reader and trip computer, steering damper and oversize discs, just to name some of them. A real masterpiece of engineering and ADB was the first to ride it outside of the GHR Honda team.
The rear tank replaced not only the subframe but the airbox as well and, combined with the dual tank up front, the 40-litre fuel load produced a more centralised weight bias, leaving Riemann impressed with how manoeuvrable and willing it was to set up into corners, with the front wheel biting predictably. In open going, given enough space, it would wind out to 179kph without so much as a wiggle through the chassis. Adam also remarked on the harmonic balance of the engine at speed, commenting that it produced less vibration the higher it revved. He found that the Showa suspension, front fairing and vibration-free engine all worked together to let him hold it pinned with no vision blur, headshake or front-end wandering and assess the approaching terrain “like watching it on TV”.
Testing on the sand of Stockton dunes revealed the bike could be ridden quite aggressively, with the wide front tyre keeping the GHR bike from burying its nose, and it surfed the sand predictably even through changes in sand density despite its weight of 140kg. The only question was reliability, given the harsh conditions and huge distances covered each day at the Dakar Rally, but GHR had a lot of experience behind them and the machine was built from a combination of CRF450R and X parts ranging from 2001 to 2002, and the team were confident.
So how did things go for the team at the 2011 Dakar? We’ll let Jacob Smith himself tell you.
“It’s the ultimate test — early mornings, big days on the bike and shit food provided by the organisers along with the other issues I had. I also had food poisoning for 24 hours, my nav tower snapped, my rear sub tank cracked causing me to run out of fuel and on the last day a tyre lever that was carried in the bashplate came out and holed the radiator. I had been running as high as 15th but eventually finished 32nd and was quite relieved to do so”.
