INTERVIEW
JCR RACING'S JOHNNY CAMPBELL
P88
not dummies; they know what to
do. And Honda's certainly not a
company that wants to put their
tail between their legs.
You and Eric [Siraton] have
had a history of shaping the
Honda off-road bikes and
Honda has given you a lot of
leeway in that. So you can
really say that you guided the
development in the RX.
I can say I had a part in it.
There's a huge team behind it
with Hide [Hanawa, off-road
coordinator at Honda R&D North
America] and Ryan Dudek and
all the test and design group at
HGA in Japan. It's a combination
between us as JCR, going out
to the races and grinding down
the series all year and learning
from that process. Then we relay
that information, and engineers
design a bike and we get a base
and then we start building the
bike from there and tailoring it.
It took a while to do what we
wanted to do with the RX and I
feel we hit the mark perfectly.
When you're doing this sort
of development and it's going
back and forth with Japan,
in the end, how close is it to
what you wanted? Is there a
lot of compromise and push-
back?
We're really only compro-
mised by how much budget and
how much time. Between those
two things, and I guess the
creativity in the group, so those
three things, that's where you
have to say stop at some point.
Of course we always want bet-
ter, better, better. But as far as
reaching our target, we hit it on
Dating back to 1992 and
his time under Bruce
Ogilvie, Campbell has been
instrumental in testing and
developing Honda off-road
motorcycles.
Campbell
takes his all-
new Honda
CRF450RX for
a spin near
his Southern
California
home.
