Honda's involvement in the Dakar Rally began in 1982 when Honda France requested a modified XR500R machine for the event. Cyril Neveu, a veteran of the early Dakar editions, won that year aboard the Honda, giving the Japanese manufacturer an outright victory at its first serious attempt in the motorcycle category.
The team developed increasingly specialised machinery through the mid-1980s. In 1986, Honda launched the NXR750, a prototype machine with a liquid-cooled V-twin engine that proved dominant. The NXR750 won the Dakar Rally four consecutive times from 1986 through 1989, establishing Honda as the most successful manufacturer of the event's early phase. These victories came during the African era when the Dakar's route traversed the Sahara and sub-Saharan terrain of west and north Africa.
Honda withdrew from factory Dakar participation after 1989 but continued to provide support to private riders on Honda production-based machines. The manufacturer remained present in the event through customer teams before returning as a full factory operation in 2013, twenty-four years after its last factory effort, with the CRF450 Rally — a machine derived from Honda's successful off-road racing programme. The CRF450 Rally won the Cross-Country Rallies World Championship in that debut factory season of 2013.
With Monster Energy as title sponsor, Honda restructured its factory team to compete at the highest level from 2013 onwards. The team developed its CRF450 Rally through successive iterations, optimising the machine for the extreme demands of the modern Dakar Rally, which moved to South America from 2009 and to Saudi Arabia from 2020.
The breakthrough for the modern team came at the 2020 Dakar Rally, the first edition held in Saudi Arabia. American rider Ricky Brabec won the motorcycle category outright, ending KTM's run of eighteen consecutive Dakar victories and marking Honda's first overall win in the event since 1989 — a gap of thirty-one years. Brabec became the first American to win the Dakar Rally motorcycle category.
Honda successfully defended the title in 2021 with Kevin Benavides, an Argentine rider, winning the motorcycle category. The consecutive victories confirmed the competitive transformation of the Monster Energy Honda Team and established the team alongside KTM and Husqvarna as a dominant force in modern rally raid motorcycle racing.
When the FIA established the World Rally-Raid Championship in 2022, Honda's factory team competed from the inaugural season. HRC won the manufacturers' title in the World Rally-Raid Championship in 2022, 2023, and 2024, demonstrating sustained competitive excellence across the broader cross-country calendar.
The CRF450 Rally is Honda's purpose-built Dakar machine, sharing design philosophy with the company's broader off-road motorcycle range while incorporating extensive racing-specific engineering. HRC manages the motorcycle racing programme and oversees vehicle development at its facilities in Japan. The Dakar team operates at events worldwide with a full support infrastructure and a roster of internationally recruited factory riders.
Honda's Dakar programme spans more than four decades and has produced victories across two distinct factory eras separated by a quarter-century. The manufacturer's ability to return after a long absence and immediately compete for victories, culminating in back-to-back outright wins in 2020 and 2021, reflects the depth of Honda's off-road motorcycle engineering expertise. The Monster Energy Honda Team's World Rally-Raid Championship titles from 2022 through 2024 further cemented Honda's position as one of the pre-eminent forces in the discipline.