So as you can imagine there was some serious eggy mud on the face of Honda America and KYB after Cole Seeleys double DNF at the Motocross of Nations at Matterley Basin. It turns out Seeley suffered identical shock failures on his Factory CRF 450R in both races! Not only was Seeley forced to withdraw from both races but this raised some serious questions as to what the hell happened! Honda have explained that mud forced the shock collar to become dislodged which caused the spring to drop and trust me you can not ride a factory bike on a track like that with sketchy shocks!

Takashi "Sam" Mishima

Motorcycle Sports Manager at Honda USA

"Clearly, we’re very disappointed by what happened at the Motocross of Nations. The factory KYB shock on our bike uses a cup-shaped spring collar with a slot where it slides over the shaft, and when the mud packed on the bottoming bumper during the first moto, enough force built up to shift the collar out of place. We used this same setup the entire AMA Pro Motocross season, including at muddy races like Unadilla, but this was the first time we experienced this issue. We replaced the entire shock for Cole’s final moto, but the same problem occurred again. Normally with issues like this, it’s difficult to even recreate them again, so the fact that this problem occurred twice on the same day suggests there was something particular about the Matterley Basin track layout and/or the consistency of the mud that created the perfect conditions for the problem."

"Honda customers should know that the retaining system on the production Showa CRF450R shock is different; in fact, the system is the same as that on the factory Showa shock used by our MXGP counterparts at Team HRC, whose bikes didn’t experience this issue at the Motocross of Nations. Obviously, we’ll look into this along with KYB and address it for next season, but in the meantime, we offer our sincere apologies to Cole, and to American motocross fans for the fact that Team USA’s results were so significantly impacted by this issue."

KYB have also issued acknowledgement and apologies for the impact the failure had on Team USA's MXoN effort. They are working hard to implement countermeasures and update the design to insure something like this does not happen again. They have confirmed that it only affects Factory issued parts for Honda HRC Factory riders, consumer shocks will not suffer from the same issues.

I hope they sort this out as suspension is one of the main things you need to rely on in Supercross/ Motocross, without that trust it is impossible to race at the safety level required for a sport that pushes its riders to the limit. I hope this is sorted out soon.

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