With that in mind and with the background in rally racing that we have amassed, both Ian and Chris decided that the only way to learn more would be to actually get out and do a rally raid...

The decision of what bike to take was easy, the Honda Europe Rally kit for the enduro based CRF450X from Honda has been four years in the making and takes the best parts and ideas from factory rally builds from France, Netherlands and Britain. It's all race tested and available to the racing public as a complete, bolt-on kit from later this year. There's no point being IN with the Honda Europe crowd if you don't at least get first shout on the customer kits and luckily that's exactly what we did, we managed to get two full rally kits plus assorted spares from Honda Europe's Rally representative in Holland literally days before leaving for Africa on the Touareg Rally. We managed to get the carbon tanks and fairings painted in time and then down to the job of bolting on the kits.

The main front tanks come in two halves rather than one big tank and they drop over and into the aluminium frame rails, there's 11 litres in each tank at the front and a scallop down through the middle of the tanks funnels air through a carbon air scoop down to the air box under the seat. The side tanks carry 6 and 4 litres respectively left and right. the left tank acts as airbox seal on the Europe kit but we opted to cut down the standard airbox cover and keep this underneath to keep dust ingress to a minimum.