INTERVIEW
JCR RACING'S JOHNNY CAMPBELL
P92
philosophy was four-strokes are
off-road bikes, and two-strokes
are motocross bikes. So we
rode those heavy trail bikes
and figured out how to win on
them. Then as the years went
on, technology and the public
called for performance four-
strokes. That was the late 90's
when we saw the development
of lightweight high-performance
four-strokes. That changed the
philosophy a little bit as far as
four-strokes are off-road bikes,
they became all the bikes.
[laughs] That ended up kind of
merging off-road bikes with mo-
tocross bikes so to speak, and
that eventually led to the devel-
opment of the 450X. The 450X
was a huge step forward, race
wise and race performance
wise, over the XR line. Because
the XR was really targeted at the
trail, where the 450X took a lot
of its characters from its other
brother, the 450R back in the
early 2000s. That decade, was
that step. We ran off that 450X
platform for over 10 years as our
off-road bike.
As time went on, we saw
enough gap between the 450X
and the 450R and as the races
evolved and off-road racing
started evolving, the need for
a competition, closed-course
off-road race machine came. So
now it's here, the 450RX and it's
an awesome machine. It's going
to do really well for us.
Now that there's a new
platform here, are there other
bikes that might be coming?
Could there be a 250 or a
350?
Certainly the platform that's
been designed over the years
that turned into these production
bikes we have now, certainly that
information and that technology
will go further into future models
and bikes along the way. CN
JCR Honda's racing program
has ventured out east to the
GNCC series, a move that has
also influenced Honda's off-
road development.
