Yamaha WR450F 2-Trac

On flat soft sand, whether standing up or sitting down, you can turn tighter and get the power on quicker without the front washing out, as it does if you try the same thing with rear wheel drive only. The 2-Trac also gives you more confidence blasting flat out down the beach, providing more stability and reducing the amount of flapping about from both ends of the bike.

It was even more reassuring on fast but twisty soft going, where the terrain required frequent changes of direction, often across deep ruts. You can feel the front wheel towing you along and keeping you out of trouble.

On the other hand, the advantages were much less clear-cut on the hard going which we also encountered, both fast and slow. The extra 7kgs of weight, much of it unsprung in the front hub, makes for a heavier feel at the bars. This makes it harder to lift the front to avoid rocks and other obstacles, and means you hit them harder when they can’t be avoided. Swapping back onto a conventional machine, the steering immediately felt lighter and the whole bike felt slightly more lively.

The engine will also rev a little more willingly, although this doesn’t mean it will actually get you anywhere any quicker – the whole point of two wheel drive is to prevent power being wasted in useless rear wheel spinning. Yamaha claim the 2-Trac is faster in a straight line on soft going, although the difference was not noticeable in our long, 40km blast down the beach. It did feel less scary though. It should need less fuel to maintain a given speed too.

The Ohlins suspension and steering damper fitted to all the test bikes was impressive, on both the one and two wheeled machines. I survived several big ‘moments’ at high speed on both machines when I hit hidden rocks and other obstacles where I thought I was definitely heading for a hospital bed, yet each time the WRs just seemed to shrug off the impact, straighten themselves out and carry on regardless while I just hung on in disbelief.

There was no opportunity to test the 2-Trac’s reputed extra grip on wet tarmac, but on dry tarmac roads, both on the straight and in corners, it felt like what it was – a normal bike with a slightly heavy front wheel.

Overall I was left with no doubts that two wheel drive is a great boon in soft sand and it’s probably at least as much help in a bog. Overall, it’s probably more of an aid to novices and average riders than to the riding gods who can get a conventional dirt bike up, over or through practically anything. As a very average rider, I want one!

It’s probably the only bike that I would contemplate returning to the masochistic madness of the Le Touquet beach race on. And for anyone deranged enough to enter the Dakar, I suspect that having two wheel drive might well make the difference between finishing the event and not finishing it, even for a good rider.

Yamaha Motor France and David Frétigné won the 450cc class in the 2004 Dakar. The Frenchman was the revelation of the event, winning the 450 class on his two-wheel-drive Yamaha WR450F 2-Trac and stunning riders of the more powerful 660 and 950cc machines by winning three stages outright and finishing seventh in the overall standings – an amazing achievement for a Dakar rookie on a 450cc machine. He’s also the first rider to win a stage with a sub-500cc bike for about 20 years!

The 18-day, 11,052 km event also provided the toughest test yet for the 2-Trac system. Yamaha entered just one machine for the event but it performed flawlessly, proving its resilience and giving the engineers plenty of vital feedback to help develop the system further.

The new USB Power Commander is already available for the ZX-10R, as is a powershifter