After watching some old Dakar Rally videos that included the Suzuki's DR Big rally racer, we thought we should build a modern version with the new V-Strom 800DE. Come along as we build the best Suzuki V-Strom 800DE in the world as we prepare to race the NORRA Mexican 1000 Rally. With a tight timeline, can we get the bike finished int time????
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Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
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00:00 Cycleworld has done some massively impressive projects, but it's been quite a while since we've attempted something this difficult.
00:07 This one is going to test the bike and the rider over many days in inhospitable terrain and conditions.
00:14 We're going rally racing, but we're doing it on a bike you might not expect as a rally racer.
00:20 This is Suzuki's V-Strom 800DE, and this is our rally race bike.
00:25 It may not look like it now, but in two months time, this thing is going to be at the start line of the NORA Mexican 1000 Rally,
00:31 staring down the barrel of six days of off-road racing.
00:35 So, we need to get to work on building the ultimate V-Strom 800DE racer.
00:40 And we're going to pay homage to Suzuki's 1990 DR-Big Paris-Dakar race bike.
00:46 And just like that bike, we're going to build it to be able to hold up to the rigors of off-road racing,
00:51 and it's going to be competitive with every bike in its class, which will mostly be all 450 dirt bikes.
00:58 The clock is ticking. We've got to get to work.
01:00 Alright, so now we have all the bodywork off the bike, and we can actually look at what we have to work with with this V-Strom.
01:09 Stock forks on the bike, fully adjustable from the factory, but a little smaller in diameter, a little shorter in length.
01:16 We looked over at our Suzuki RMZ project bike, and I went, "Hmm, I wonder if those forks will fit on this bike."
01:23 This is the RM fork, and this is the V-Strom fork.
01:26 This fork, if you can see, is about an inch and a half longer than the V-Strom fork.
01:34 But, it also has 80 millimeters, or 3.2 inches more, suspension travel.
01:40 So that's going to give us some more ground clearance, and it's going to give us more travel to work with,
01:44 in order to be able to get more control and better suspension action.
01:48 So, the only problem is, they don't exactly bolt up super easily.
01:53 So what we're going to do is we're going to modify the triple clamp.
01:55 This hole just needs to be slightly bigger, so we're going to send it off to JD Moto Service in Long Beach,
02:01 and he's going to bore this out to the correct diameter.
02:04 It is like rally Christmas today.
02:07 We finally got a bunch of the parts in for this bike, and none too soon.
02:12 As you can see, it's kind of a mess still.
02:14 On top of that, we got our RMZ forks on the bike, finally.
02:18 Now we just got to get them re-sprung and valved for a 500-pound motorcycle with a 230-pound rider.
02:26 So, that is really the last hurdle to get over, is getting these forks done, and the last thing is this shock here.
02:36 This is the bane of my existence.
02:39 This shock right here, nobody makes a replacement part, no one makes anything yet for it that we can find.
02:46 So, we're going to have to have this thing custom built to be longer, have stiffer springs, and have better damping for the weight of the bike.
02:55 This is the last piece of the puzzle, and it's not solved yet,
02:58 and we basically have four or five days left of building this bike in the space of like two weeks.
03:03 So, very, very stressful.
03:05 First off, we're going to put on some new bars.
03:08 These are Flex handlebars from Fast Company.
03:11 They are super rad, especially for desert racing or any type of off-road racing.
03:16 They have an elastomer inside.
03:18 It actually damps up and down, gives you a little bit of cush when you're hitting big bumps, and it takes some vibration out.
03:25 It's really rad. They got different color elastomers.
03:27 Depending on the color is the durometer and how flexy they are, so that's pretty rad.
03:33 With that, they've got their hand guards that work with their kit.
03:37 We've got hand guards, we've got a handlebar pad.
03:39 This bit of kit right here from Rally Motoshop is super, super rad.
03:45 This is very, very important for what we're doing.
03:47 Actually, if we didn't have this stuff, we weren't going racing.
03:50 This is the roadbook holder.
03:52 This is what holds what we are doing and where we are going and telling us where we are going.
03:57 Super, super important pieces from W.
04:00 W. USA built us wheel sets for this bike to handle the weight, to handle the desert racing.
04:05 We've got Accel A60 rims.
04:07 This is a stock hub, but then on the front we have a Han front hub that fits normally a Suzuki RMZ fitment.
04:15 Those hubs, those beautiful polished hubs, came off of a wheel set that Ken Roxon used on his race bike.
04:21 Maybe we'll get a little faster just by osmosis. We'll see.
04:26 Alright, so we've got our DNA air filter installed on the bike.
04:30 It is super fast, super easy to do.
04:32 Basically, four screws.
04:33 Granted, the stock air box is a little fiddly to get open.
04:37 You've got these snorkels in the way of the screws a little bit.
04:41 So, what we're doing is we're running the DNA kit with the air filter holder that gets rid of this air box top,
04:49 which basically makes it faster and easier for us to change an air filter.
04:53 Now this has like a 97-98% filtering efficiency, which is great for street use and even occasional dual sport use.
05:02 What we're doing is way beyond the normal use cases of a Suzuki V-Strom, which is desert racing.
05:08 We're going to be eating a lot of dust.
05:09 We're going to be in the dust all day, and so we want the very best protection we can get,
05:14 which comes from these cotton air filters, which is a fabric air filter.
05:19 We've got the ability to clean our air filters every night in Baja, change them out.
05:24 So, we're looking good.
05:25 All right, so we're ready to put the bars on, but we've got a few things we have to consider on this bike.
05:32 So, we have to use this clutch perch because it has a sensor/switch for the clutch,
05:39 so you can start the bike in gear that it needs to know that the clutch is in in order to activate the starter.
05:45 So, you have to slide it on before you put the bars on.
05:48 And then, when we go over to the other side, we've got the ride-by-wire throttle housing, which, same story,
05:57 you have to slide it on before putting everything else on.
06:01 Okay, so these aren't the clamps that we'll end up being using.
06:05 These are just to hold the bars for now because there's going to be a steering stabilizer sitting in here,
06:10 which will use completely new clamps.
06:13 So, for now, this is what we're doing.
06:15 Okay, so now we're going to put on the Brembo Master Cylinder.
06:19 We're going to kind of mock fit it up.
06:20 All right, all good, actually.
06:22 I was worried about this adjuster coming in contact with that, but we are good.
06:26 Something has worked out in a bike build.
06:30 This might be the only time it happens.
06:32 This is fun. This is easy. It's really nice.
06:42 Handlebars, for the most part, are installed.
06:49 Now we just need to put a steering damper on it.
06:51 So, we're getting the foot pegs on from Fast Company.
06:54 This is the stock one, and this is the--
06:57 Obviously, the Fast Company, you can see quite a big difference in size.
07:00 This is going to make it way more comfortable for long days, as it will give us more control on the bike.
07:06 This thing probably weighs twice as much as this thing.
07:10 You've got a lot more service area.
07:13 Cool, we're going to get the other side on, and then on to the next.
07:17 Okay, so first we're going to throw our Galfa rotor on this bad boy.
07:20 So, this is a 270 oversized rotor.
07:25 It would normally be on a motocross bike, but we are putting it on an adventure bike, obviously.
07:30 The reason I went oversized is because we're on an oversized bike.
07:34 We've got a lot of weight to slow down.
07:36 Okay, so now that we've got the rotor cleaned up, now we just need to bolt it on.
07:40 Try not to touch the rotor with the Loctite on our fingers.
07:44 We'll just tighten these up, and then we will get them snug.
07:49 And then we'll come back with a torque wrench and torque them again.
07:54 So, now we're going to start building up our rear wheel.
07:56 We've got a Galfa Wave rotor to put on the rear of this awesome W wheel.
08:01 So, this is a stock V-Strom hub.
08:05 It still has the Cush drive and all the things you need for an adventure bike.
08:08 It's very large, obviously.
08:10 But we've got a Takasago Excel A60 rim.
08:13 These are the super strong off-road racing rims.
08:16 This is the strongest rim that Takasago Excel makes.
08:20 W, they build awesome, awesome wheels, and they wanted us to have the strongest possible wheel they could build.
08:29 These are the stock spokes that came out of the stock bike.
08:32 And this is the rear wheel spoke from a stock V-Strom.
08:36 Look at the difference in size between these two bad boys.
08:39 It is a huge, huge difference.
08:42 This is the stock 17-inch V-Strom rim.
08:46 You can see massive, massive, massive difference.
08:49 So, this is great for a nice mix of street and dirt riding, right?
08:54 You're going to have a larger tire that's going to work great on the street, and it's going to work in the dirt.
08:59 We're only going to be in the dirt.
09:00 We're never going to be on the street.
09:02 We don't care about street handling.
09:05 We only care about dirt handling.
09:07 And so, because of that, we want a dirt bike-sized rear tire on this thing and a dirt bike-sized rear wheel.
09:13 Okay, so these wheels are ready for tires and the moose balls.
09:21 As soon as we get the balls, we're going to get the tires built, put them on these rims, and then we're going to have a rolling chassis.
09:27 Okay, so we got our moose balls here finally.
09:29 These guys right here take the place of a one-piece moose, which is kind of cool.
09:37 But once they're all together, simulate a fully inflated tire.
09:41 And the nice part about them is they come in sections, so it's easy to get inside.
09:45 They're made by Mr. Wolf, and they say that these should last us the entire rally without a problem whatsoever.
09:53 Okay, we got our tire stand with our awesomely built W wheel.
09:57 Takasago Accel A60 rim on it.
10:01 And now we're going to put Dunlop EN91 DOT-approved dual-sport tire.
10:08 This is a super aggressive enduro dual-sport tire.
10:10 And the reason we chose this tire is it has basically a higher load rating and higher speed rating than all of Dunlop's off-road tires.
10:18 Even a 606 and a 908 actually have a lower weight rating and speed rating than these tires do.
10:25 So we're going to get these things on with the moose balls in them and see how it goes.
10:31 It's going to be a first.
10:33 Okay, we got it on.
10:35 It actually took two of us because we put 27 moose balls in this thing, which is probably more than normal.
10:45 It is more than normal.
10:47 We only had one left over.
10:48 We tried 28, and it was super tight.
10:50 Now that we got the process down, I think we could probably get 28 in the next one.
10:57 Okay, so on the fit-up of the front wheel, I knew this was going to be a little bit of an issue.
11:04 But I wanted to get everything built before I did measurements and everything.
11:08 But these triple clamps for the Adventure Bike are obviously wider because a stock V-Strom front wheel is much wider than what we're running now.
11:18 So with that comes an issue that we're using RMZ forks, which have RMZ fork lowers and not the V-Strom.
11:27 So the actual inner diameter of the V-Strom axle and the RMZ axle are identical.
11:35 The problem is this one's not long enough.
11:38 So that's one issue.
11:41 Second issue is the diameter of this collar on this one is much larger than that one.
11:51 So what we're going to do is we're going to turn this one down to the size of that one.
11:56 And then we're going to have to shorten this shoulder to a total length of 47 millimeters for the shoulder in order for everything in the front end here to line up.
12:10 So that will get the front tire right in the middle of the forks.
12:14 So we're getting there on our rally towers.
12:16 And before this thing sat way out here.
12:19 And in order to fit everything else inside that space, my buddy Whiskey Dave over here, he sunk this thing in and put it down lower.
12:31 And it's out of the way of all the forks and nothing's going to hit it.
12:35 It's actually protected and it's going to sit sucked way back from where it was before, which is really nice.
12:41 And while that sits there, this is the holder for the road book.
12:45 The road book goes inside here.
12:47 All this sits above it.
12:49 And because we don't need to read the gauges on the bike, we just need them there to let the bike run and pick the modes, which are over here.
12:57 This is the tracking device and safety device that is required.
13:01 And so we didn't want this thing to get super tall.
13:04 So now everything kind of overlaps and it's a super clean design.
13:08 High dollar paint booth we got going on here.
13:15 So it's not ready to ride in the dirt yet because we just have a strut holding the rear suspension up while the shock is getting worked on.
13:26 So she's a hard tail right now, but we've got wheel on the thing.
13:31 And that is how far the swing arm is coming down.
13:36 The reason we're taking a Yoshimura is this right here.
13:38 So we've added 50 millimeters of travel to the swing arm.
13:43 And with that at max droop, the swing arm hits the pipe.
13:49 So Yoshimura is going to change out where it exits the catalyzer because we're going to keep it actually running with the catalyzer and all the O2 sensors and all of that stuff.
13:59 Because it runs good that way and we don't have to worry about remapping and doing a bunch of weird stuff.
14:05 This is the front wheel sensor.
14:07 We're moving it to the back with this one, basically to splice these two together.
14:11 So then the computer is getting the information that the front wheel and the rear wheel are going the same speed, which gives us full power all the time.
14:18 We're not quite ready with our RMZ front suspension.
14:21 So we've got a different set of forks, same diameter and all that stuff sitting on it.
14:27 But we don't have the right axle in it.
14:29 We don't have a few of the things, but we're getting it just so it can roll off and go to the Yoshimura R&D and they can do their fit up on the exhaust and get that thing ready.
14:39 So we're about to let it kind of sit under its own weight, even though it's not on the right suspension.
14:45 That's all we had to do was do that while you're underneath it.
14:53 It's not even bending, dude.
15:00 I told you.
15:02 Nope, it bent.
15:05 God dang it.
15:09 (music)
15:11 Okay, so we're getting down into the nitty gritty of it.
15:15 And one of the biggest problems we had on building this bike is figuring out how to build a shock for this bike.
15:21 So we got on the telephone and we called Cogent Dynamics in North Carolina.
15:26 They stepped up and built us this guy.
15:31 So this shock is a fully custom built shock with Cogent's valve bodies, valve head, shock shaft, internals.
15:41 Everything is custom built for this bike, but they have a setup for stock bikes for your V-Strom later in the year.
15:49 So what we've got is we've got a 700 pound spring instead of a 625.
15:54 We've got a little more rebound damping.
15:57 We've got more compression damping.
15:59 We've got a remote reservoir to keep it cooler.
16:03 And it just makes it fit in the bike easier.
16:05 That was one of the real problems was finding a shock cylinder head that had a piggyback that would fit inside this bike.
16:11 It's a very, very compact setup on this bike.
16:14 Really tough to fit stuff in.
16:15 And so Cogent, their solution was remote reservoir.
16:18 It's 20 millimeters longer.
16:20 So with the linkage, that gives us 50 more millimeters of wheel travel, which is comparable to the front end.
16:26 The front end, we have 80 more millimeters, but we're getting close front to rear, and we're going to have a lot more control.
16:32 We're going to have stiffer spring.
16:34 It's going to have better holdup.
16:35 And overall, it's just going to be super awesome.
16:38 Here we are with the next piece done.
16:46 This took a little bit of custom fitting.
16:48 So this is the stock muffler.
16:50 It weighs 10.6 pounds approximately.
16:53 This thing is 6.8 pounds.
16:56 So it's almost four pounds lighter than the other one, and it's hanging off the back of the bike.
17:00 So that makes a big difference.
17:01 What basically Yosh did is they built this whole mid pipe right here to clear and have more clearance.
17:07 So when this thing goes to full travel, it's not smashing into the pipe.
17:12 Most of the time, I don't need instructions for motorcycle stuff.
17:15 But for this one, you definitely are going to read the instructions on this AXP skid plate.
17:20 There's a lot of pieces and nuts and bolts and parts to it.
17:23 But once it's all together, I've had experiences with these skid plates before.
17:27 They're super solid.
17:28 They just take a little bit of time to put together.
17:30 It's not just four bolts and it's on.
17:32 All right, skid plate on, done.
17:34 Look at this beast.
17:35 It's beefy.
17:36 I got to tighten up a few things in the front here.
17:38 But we've got everything mounted in the back.
17:41 It's got some padding to protect itself from the cases.
17:44 And overall, man, it's a really solid, thick piece.
17:48 I'm really pumped on it.
17:50 Scott's steering stabilizer.
17:52 There's not a mount made for the V-Strom 800DE yet.
17:56 Except for one guy in Germany, Stefan Hessler, Hessler Rally Team.
18:02 He is the DR big expert in Germany.
18:08 I've sent him a few questions.
18:09 He's always been kind enough to answer me, give me some tips.
18:12 And when I said I need a steering stabilizer mount, he says he makes one and he does.
18:16 So this is a sub mount, so this goes underneath the handlebars.
18:20 It goes on some risers.
18:22 And then this guy plugs into his post that he's made.
18:26 So this is the front tank mount.
18:28 It's got two mounts here.
18:30 And then this is where the arm of this guy will attach.
18:35 There.
18:37 Success.
18:39 Arm installed.
18:41 All right, we've got the steering stabilizer installed.
18:43 And we only have one little issue that we've got to work out.
18:46 We've got a different arm than the one he recommended.
18:49 So we've got to order up another arm or find a spacer for here to bring this pin up a tiny bit.
18:56 Either way works.
18:58 And then these bars are way too tall now, I think.
19:00 So we're going to put the tank on, put the seat on, and figure out these bars might be too tall.
19:04 We'll need to put shorter bars on.
19:06 Because when I'm sitting, I may be like going to Daytona Bike Week instead of the Dakar Rally.
19:13 So I guess we can talk about the seat.
19:16 So we don't have the tank bolted down.
19:18 But I wanted to see ergonomically if this is going to work with these bars or not, or if we need lower bars.
19:25 So we've got a Seat Concepts seat, custom made also.
19:29 This is the first of the Bistrom 800 DE seats from Seat Concepts.
19:34 It's taller here where the normal rider seat is.
19:38 And it basically is almost the same height as the rear passenger seat.
19:41 It comes all the way down. It's thinner.
19:43 So this is going to feel more like a dirt bike seat now.
19:45 But it's still a Seat Concepts seat, which means it's super high quality.
19:50 Awesome stitching, awesome stuff, and it's going to be comfortable.
19:53 This might be an option for anyone that goes adventure riding.
19:56 Let's see how it fits.
20:02 Actually, that's pretty good.
20:05 I don't think we need to drop the bars down.
20:09 I think that feels about right.
20:12 The bike is very tall now.
20:14 Okay, it's a one footer for me.
20:18 I'm 5'10".
20:20 We've got to extend the kickstand.
20:23 Yeah, I can't touch with both feet.
20:26 That's okay. I just do that.
20:30 Just slide my butt over and all is good.
20:31 That's a tall bike.
20:33 Maybe we bit off more than we could chew.
20:35 I probably could have rode this thing complete stock.
20:37 And it would have been just fine.
20:39 I would have done great. I wouldn't have had to stress.
20:41 But I'd open my mouth and say I was going to build the baddest V-Strom in the world.
20:46 And here we are.
20:48 We're just a couple days out from leaving.
20:51 And we have a lot left to do.
20:53 There's a lot done.
20:55 And there's a lot of good stuff on this bike.
20:56 And it's going to get done.
20:58 We still have to get the forks re-sprung, re-valved.
21:01 That's coming down to the wire.
21:03 We need to make brake lines.
21:04 We need to wire up all the electronics for the rally equipment.
21:08 And then we have to ride the thing.
21:10 We really need to get some miles on it before we go to the race.
21:13 I don't know how it's going to work out.
21:15 I don't know how I'm going to sleep.
21:17 And then I'm going to go race for six days.
21:19 I guess stay tuned.
21:21 And see in the next video if we get it done or not.
21:25 If you like what we're doing, hit the like button.
21:28 Please subscribe.
21:29 Put the comments down below.
21:31 Give me some encouragement to make it through this thing.
21:33 Because right now, I'm beat.
21:36 And I'm worn down.
21:38 See you then.
21:40 [BLANK_AUDIO]