Yahoo Autos Ricky Brabec on taming the Honda CRF450 RALLY
With 15 seconds to spare, Ricky Brabec guided his Monster Energy Honda CRF450 RALLY to victory in the recent Argentine Desafio Ruta 40 Rally.
Having already triumphed in the 2024 Dakar Rally earlier this year, the Argentina result further underscored Brabec’s dominance in the 2024 World Rally Raid Championship, increased his lead in the point standings and fortified his position as one of the world’s elite off-road motorcycle racers.
But with summer months, downtime, and riding motos having all part of his recent day-to-day existence, the time is now approaching for Brabec and the Honda HRC FIM World Rally-Raid Championship effort to get back to work.
“We have durability testing coming up in two weeks,” he said. “After durability testing, we have Vegas to Reno race held by Best In The Desert. After that comes more durability and more testing and then from that we basically have September open and free and then we go to Africa at the end of September for the Rallye Du Maroc and the final round of the World Rally-Raid Championship.”
In developing the Honda HRC CRF450 Rally machine for the 7,000-to 8,000-kilomoter World Rally-Raid odysseys Brabec competes in, the HRC Honda Racing organization inspires confidence.
“With the durability side of testing, we go to Glamis, we got to Barstow, we go to Dumont Dunes,” he said. “We travel around to find different terrains and different elevations and different conditions and whatnot. What goes into it is a little bit of everything, you know? We have engine technicians, we have wiring technicians, we have chassis technicians, we have basically a technician for every piece of the motorcycle there for basically a whole month.
“We’re making small changes here and there, we’re giving the right direction, the wrong direction, so that we they can figure out what to improve and what not to improve. Being part of it is really cool because being pretty smooth with the words and really focusing on what you want to change or what you feel with the bike can help them make their job way easier and also help the bike improve.’
Is a lot of what ultimately goes into the HRC CRF450 Rally the end result of Ricky Brabec putting his thumbprint on the machine?
“Yes and no,” he said. “There are bits and pieces of it I’ve been involved with, but overall Honda knows beforehand what works and what’s not going to work. They deliver a really good motorcycle pretty much off the floor, and then we make small adjustments.”
Brabec spoke to the unknowns of competing in the World Rally-Raid Championship, where riders often spend 12 hours a day navigating. rocks, ditches, holes, dry rivers, dunes, square ended bumps and high-speed drop-offs.
“We don’t know what’s coming up at us,” he said. “They give us a roadbook and say, ‘Okay, well here is the roadbook. Hopefully everything is marked.’ This all comes with experience of racing in the desert. Reading terrain at a far distance and going fast doing it while reading a roadbook can be a challenge.
“I’ve been doing it for 10 years now with the rally stuff. You can never learn too much. I’m still learning and still practicing. Yeah, we’ve won the Dakar Rally twice, but that doesn’t make you the best navigator out there or the fastest person out there. There are always areas where you can improve. That’s what we work on year round. Just growing up in District 37 and reading terrain is where I have gotten a lot of the experience from. You know, with a lot of the areas around the world that have deserts, those deserts looks like the desert that we have here. It’s all familiar and it looks, more or less, the same. One desert might be more green and one desert might be less rocky, but the desert is the desert and it is the desert for a reason.
“Like I said, we don’t really know where we are going out there. We’re just following our roadbook and our roadbook has our mileage on it and has the direction on it and has the dangers on it. We get the roadbook 20 minutes before we start and that’s barely enough time to put the roadbook in your bike. After that, it is staying focused and staying mentally in the game is of really big importance for this race. Before we get there you can do some investigation, like the lay of the land and stuff like that, but we don’t technically know where we’re going until we’ve already been there.
Next up for Brabec and the Monster Energy Honda Team will be the World Rally-Raid Rallye Du Maroc on Octoer 5 through October 11, 2024.
“We’re basically mellowing out right now, but when October comes around we are going to be full gas again and training and back to Moracco,” he said.
“I’m definitely already looking forward to Morocco even though we have two months. To get prepared for Morocco, durability will be the first step because we’re going to have some new pieces and new parts on the bike. We’ll go training, we’ll do some roadbooks, we’ll stay in shape and we’ll stay healthy and arrive to Morocco at 100 percent. Then we’ll go from Morocco to Dakar and try to spike right in the middle of Dakar so we have energy every single day.”
