Honda’s first take at the CRF450L was a curious one. It came, it saw, but it didn’t quite conquer. Instead it quietly disappeared from Honda showroom floors after only a couple of seasons in the trail/enduro/dual-sport bike wilderness. Was it a trail bike? Was it an enduro bike? Was it a dual-sport bike?
It performed like a trail bike. But it was priced like an enduro bike ($12,990 RRP back in 2018 when it launched). Yet Honda tried to promote it as a dual-sport bike. While to get the best out of the bike, Honda Australia created the LX Enduro kit, which included an FMF exhaust system with Powerbomb header and Q4 muffler, a Vortex Ignitions X10 ECU and SK Designs custom graphics kit — which came with a price tag of $2,600.
I had a CRF450L for a year in 2019 as a project bike build while I worked freelance with magazine. The bike had come to me ‘stripped down’ after the editorial team had tried to turn it into more of an off-road-biased enduro bike. But that’s what the CRF450X had been all about. So I was given the brief to take the L model and make it back into a dual-sport
