Dakar. It’s one word that evokes so much mental imagery with adventure bike riders. True fans of the Dakar Rally will longingly remember the era of the late 1980s and early ’90s when petrol-powered dinosaurs plundered the sand dunes of the African deserts. These hand-reared beasts, which featured booming twin- and four-cylinder powerplants shoe-horned into long-travel skeletons, ultimately spawned roadgoing replicas that instantly began thundering around the most far-flung reaches of the globe. And they did it bearing such romantic names as Africa Twin, Adventure, Dakar, DR Big, Elefant, Rally, Super Enduro, Super Ténéré, Ténéré and Tengai, to name but a few.
But a decade later the beasts were ruled out of the race, replaced by smaller but just as exotic creatures of 690 and then 450cc capacity in an effort to bring speeds down and make the event safer.
Since then, though, the Dakar replica production bikes have all but disappeared.
Until 2017, when Honda pulled the wraps off its new-generation Dakar
