VOL. 55 ISSUE 44 NOVEMBER 6, 2018 P87
WHAT IS
THE CRF450L?
It's fairly easy to see what the
Honda CRF450L is not. It is not a
race bike. It doesn't really feel like a
converted off-road woods weapon
with blinkers. While its roots cer-
tainly sprout from the updated CRF
race machines, the modifications
done to the platform for dual-sport
use make it worlds apart from
most Hondas you'll see racing on
the weekend. Its closest in-house
relative is the recently launched
CRF450X—a machine with perfor-
mance more in-line with the com-
petition-derived dual-sports from
Europe than the CRF450L has.
One could easily argue the Hon-
da CRF450L is a bike closer to the
pedestrian side of the dual-sport
spectrum than it is the aggressive/
competitive side. On quite a few
levels it aligns more with the subset
of dual-sport long-dominated by
cost-conscious, insanely depend-
able and fairly vanilla bikes like
Suzuki's DR-Z's, Kawasaki's KLRs,
and even Honda's own CRF-L line
(650s and 250s). But, it comes
with a premium price tag, tighter
service intervals and is compro-
mising some on-road comfort and
range in favor of performance here.
Where the CRF450L thrives in
the range of dual sport isn't easy to
define. It's a bike that is spanning a
lot of territory. It's a bike that has a
multiple personalities at times, likely
because it can do so many things.
But what is it really best at? That's
what we're trying to find out.
