CDR Yamaha’s Craig Dack has confirmed that Yamaha Motor Australia’s factory MX1 squad will begin development on the all-new 2018 YZ450F next month in Queensland.

With a completely redesigned model set to hit our shores for the new season, the CDR Yamaha team will soon receive the pre-production version which Dack expects to be the most impressive base model yet.

“We’ll get a bike within the next couple of weeks,” Dack told MotoOnline.com.au. “There’s obviously none physically in Australia right now, so we’re waiting on some pre-production bikes to come and we’re planning to do a shakedown with the bike at Coolum in the middle of July. We’ve been following the progress with this new model and we know that all of the changes that have been made, on paper, are all positive and in the right direction.”

CDR’s testing program will fall in line with the Australian national press launch next month and, having achieved great success aboard Yamaha’s unique reverse engine YZ450F model in recent years, Dack looks forward to the latest generation’s arrival – expecting it to be ‘the one’.

“This is really the third generation of the reverse engine bike and Yamaha has always been very bold coming out with new concepts,” Dack said. “If you look back at the history of Yamaha, they’ve always been very brave in what they do.

“The very first of the reverse engine bikes copped some flack in some countries, although we had no problems with it here, but it’s a credit to Yamaha to see them persevere and we expect this model to be the one.”

The CDR Yamaha team will target the upcoming Australian Supercross Championship to launch the all-new model, although an even earlier release could still be on the cards according to Dack: “We have a bit of an idea in our heads, certainly supercross would be something we want to launch it for, but there is something in the back of our mind that we might want to do earlier.

“There’s just so many different things to consider when you do that, being a whole different bike, there’s many new parts and we need a good inventory of parts to back us up at the races. The second consideration is that we have had a lot of development time on the current model, three-and-half years, so we’ve got a very good bike.

“With a brand new bike out of the crate, we don’t actually know it that well and we have to be sensible about bringing it on too early. There’s so many boxes to tick before we cross the line with it, but supercross is our main target and then maybe something earlier, it just depends.”

CDR Yamaha’s defending MX Nationals Dean Ferris currently leads the MX1 series once again in the mid-season break after winning all five rounds to date this year.