Words: Tim Britton Pics: Gary Chapman
When Honda debuted the 1981 CR250 they launched many firsts – liquid cooling, Pro-Link suspension – but it was the last to have the Elsinore designation.
Cast your mind back to the MX world of the Seventies and early Eighties when development seemed to happen at a phenomenal pace; each factory strove to outdo the other with this tweak and that mod, then next week it was all change again. It really was a frantic pace forced on the world by the Japanese makers who had gone from not really understanding the off-road world to virtually dominating it.
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All areas of the machine were scrutinised minutely to see what could be improved on, what needed altering and what should be dropped. Take the world championship-winning Honda we featured last issue – air-cooled and twinshock. Top of the world… but by January 1981 The Motor Cycle had a brand new Honda on the front cover and what a bike! Red with a hint of black and white, gone were two rear dampers, in came Pro-Link… gone were the massive fins of the air-cooled engine, in their place a water jacket for cooling and sustained performance though the wheels still had drum brakes as discs were a year or two away.
Read more in the Winter issue of CDB
