OLD WARRIORS

As you will have seen a few pages back, we caught up with Beau Ralston to talk about his KX450 race bike. But I also asked him to bring along his dad’s CR500 and YZ490. These aren’t what you’d call showroom-condition bikes — far from it, in fact. They aren’t even subject to a regular maintenance schedule. But they get raced fairly regularly and loved for what they are, which is 30-odd-year-old bikes that are still running in 2020, an era when it’s impossible to imagine keeping a race bike for five years, let alone still having it in 30.

Beau rode them for the first time not long before we did