Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Service manual Yamaha WR 450
On the other hand, it didn’t take long to establish that two wheel drive is no substitute for riding ability either. I struggled to keep up with our valiant leader Alexandre Kowalski from Yamaha France, who led us a merry dance across the dunes on a near-standard, one wheel drive WR450. He was like a two-wheeled ‘Pied Piper’, hopping and skipping across the treacherous obstacles while I confirmed my ‘non-expert’ status by taking two dives over the handlebars in the first five minutes.
The two wheel drive does inspire confidence though, especially in soft sand and it does make a real difference, as I discovered when I swapped back to the rear wheel drive bike. In the dunes, I needed more of a run-up to get up the same near-vertical climb and when I got stuck, the conventional bike required much more effort to extract it, while the 2-Trac actually pulls itself out by the front wheel.
