Honda’s Electric CR Motocrosser Gets Mixed Results In First Weekend

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Honda took an electric motorcycle racing for the first time over the weekend, and the end result was a mixture of failure and success. The bike didn’t rack up the results that the company hoped, but it certainly was fast—maybe too fast!

Over the October 28-29 weekend, the Honda CR Electric Proto made its race debut in the All Japan Motocross Championship (held, as the name implies, in Japan). It wasn’t the first time Honda had brought an electric dirt bike to the series; back in 2019, it demoed a prototype at an event. See that experiment below:

But this past weekend was the first time Honda was actually going to race its machine against gasoline-powered competition, racing in the IA1 class against 450s. It proved it was serious by bringing Trey Canard, former AMA Pro Motocross champ, over to race the bike. And while the results weren’t necessarily what Honda had hoped for, the bike certainly showed off its potential.

In the first moto of the weekend, Canard finished second, bringing the battery bike to 0.7 seconds off the fastest lap. In the second moto, things fell apart; Canard ended up tangled with Jay Wilson, and crashed out of the race. It was a similar situation in the third moto. In that race, Canard ended up crashing early-on once the track started to develop ruts, and that was it, his chances of winning were gone.

Expect to see a lot more of this bike in coming years. Photo: Honda

Sounds disappointing, but Honda pointed out that Canard grabbed two of three holeshots in those motos, and closed its press release with this statement:

… with the opportunity provided by racing to learn, develop and prove the prototype machine in the heat of battle for the first time, it has been a successful and encouraging debut for the CR Electric Proto—a weekend that has provided valuable data for ongoing development of Honda’s all-electric motocross initiative.

That doesn’t sound like they’re too worried about the lack of early results—and one podium in its first three motos, and the only moto it finished, isn’t exactly embarrassing, either. We would expect to see this bike a lot more in coming months. From what Honda said, it doesn’t seem that Canard had a whole lot of seat time on the machine before entering the race weekend, so if we see a ready-to-go pilot aboard this machine, the next outing may see a very different success story.

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