Exclusive: New Honda mini-Africa Twin for 2017 (official drawings)

At last year’s Tokyo Motor Show Honda revealed a ‘concept’ CRF250 Rally, the small capacity Africa Twin, based on the current CRF250L. According to Honda this was just a concept, not planned for production at the time, but it was pretty clear from the start that this was always going to be a part of the Japanese company’s line-up.

Now we have further reason to believe that a production bike is scheduled for 2017. Why do we think that? Because we have just been sent a bucket load of fresh patents that Honda has filed – and they all show a bike that looks an awful lot like the CRF250 Rally. Here’s a run though of what we’ve been sent and what we can see from the drawings:

Multiple clutch patent

The bike that the clutch patent is designed for is not mentioned (those details are generally not given), but the bike in the below drawing looks awfully familiar:

Cooling structure patent

The patent for the cooling system is interesting as it clearly states that the system is designed for fuel tanks (yep, plural). The drawing confirms that there’s a rear fuel tank in addition to the standard tank. This would make the bike a proper long-distance off-road rocket.

Electrical component mounting structure patent

Here Honda is trying to find an optimum place to hide all electrics in the dead space of the bike without them getting fried by the engine, while also simplifying the set-up as much as possible. Again, we feel confident that the bike in the drawings is the CRF250 Rally.

Rear fuel tank patent

As the cooling system patent above suggested, there’s a rear fuel tank, designed to use the space between the rear frame and the rear wheel. The fuel tank is formed into a U-shape when viewed from above.