Report From Japan
REPORT FROM JAPAN
YUKIO KURODA
A BIG DIRT BIKE FROM HONDA?
No, not the SL 350—I mean the real thing, like a motocrosser, for example. After the fame and success of Yamaha’s DT-1, who can doubt that other makers, especially the biggest one, would love to cash in on the hot market for nimble off-road Singles?
Both Suzuki and Kawasaki are trying to carve out a piece of this constituency for themselves with sleek and swift 250-cc and 350-cc machines, and folks around here have been wondering if Honda will spring a pukka scrambles machine on us this year. Yes. That’s sort of an educated guess (more of a guess than educated), based on a little psychology and a lot of projection—and the conviction that if an ohc Single that is both light and powerful and handles like a dream can be built, Honda is the one to do it.
I wouldn’t even be surprised to see them build an ultra-advanced pushrod machine. There’s no real need for umpteen zillion rpms in a motocrosser, and the CB 750 proves that Honda can get the power without the revs. Such a mount would both save total engine weight and would keep what weight there is down low where it’s more manageable. Many Honda fanatics would swoon if they saw a 350-cc or 500-cc Single, a pushrod Single, but the company itself has never been bound to any tradition for its own sake—except the tradition of building swift and sturdy motorcycles and making carloads of money from them.
Rumors about Honda incorporating magnesium into production castings would add interest to the speculation, and a plain-bearing, dry-sump machine (in the tradition of the 750, their first plain-bearing motorcycle engine) would further help to get weight down to realms undreamt of by past Hondas. Therein lies their problem: they love to make machines that will run all the way to the stars and back and never break, and that means weight, so if you want to play Joel Robert on your SL 350, you’d better be a stunt man, and an immortal one, too. Heavy off-road machines just don’t handle. That’s one of the rules of the game. Racing Hondas had to learn that lesson, but the company finally shaved here and pared there, and the latter-generation road racers were extremely light: the twincylinder dohc 50-cc machine was said to have a dry weight of only 99 lb.!
It’s a challenge to Honda, and one they might not pass up (for commercial reasons). At this point, your guess is about as good as mine about the possibility of a big dirt single and its possible shape, but hell, knowing Honda, I wouldn’t be surprised if they built a two-stroke. How’s that grab you?
NEW CB 750 GOODIES
The four-cylinder Honda presents a special challenge to the fairing designer, especially with that big engine and those high bars (and you’d better be able to out arm-wrestle King Kong to handle a CB 750 with flat bars or clip-ons). But Tamotsu Yoshihara of Pacific Overseas has tackled the problem of how to break up the wall of wind created by the considerable frontal area of the machine. And provide a little rider comfort, too.
The result should help keep all those big juicy bugs that like to play chicken with motorcycles from making omelettes on your tuxedo, and this fairing is rather attractive, too. While not as sleek as a racing design, Yoshihara-san’s new fairing, a two-piece unit with mirrors and a headlight cutaway, should appeal to a lot of owners of the big Four. CYCLE WORLD has received a lot of requests for the address of Pacific Overseas, so I’ll give it to you here so you can write to him yourself if you so wish: Tamotsu Yoshihara, Pacific Overseas, Sentai Building, No. 21-2 Sakaemachi, Ikuta-ku, Kobe, Japan.
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EXPO '70
The happening of the year for the Japanese, a most festival-conscious people, is the first World Exposition ever held in the country. Expo ’70 is expected to draw millions from all parts of the world.
One of the events held on a daily basis is a parade of policemen of the world, and the various sorts of acrobatic motorcycle riding they perform wow the locals like it used to do back at the State Fairs of bygone days.
Teams of German police, riding solid-sprung BMWs, do a pre-Aquarian version of the group grope, with 11 brave peace officers hung out all over the machine. Another rider, a soloist, does a good imitation of the late Floyd Clymer’s world-famous riding-a-motorcycle-backwards act, and in a grand finale 17 riders, carrying flags of Germany and Japan, ride three motorcycles for the gathered thousands.
EASY RIDING
The tremendous impact of the movie, “Easy Rider,” has reached as far as the ordinary street rider, who may be seen draggin’ down Main Street in high style, his Honda or Yamaha adorned with assorted bolt-on goodies now available for chopper lovers. Those slim and willowy extended forks, which are about as safe to ride on as a python’s back, have been outlawed by the government, but sissy bars, reach-for-the-sky handlebars and high-risers are spreading like the plague.
One young gent even painted his machine to look like Peter Fonda’s ill-fated craft. He had seen “Easy Rider” four times.
Talk about a cultural revolution!
THE KAWASAKI V-4
One of the perils of motor journalism is the commercial necessity to dribble facts and leak fantasies concerning new and secret machines which companies are working on, and then to have to backtrack and weasel out when they fail to materialize later on. The companies could crack this racket by just coming out and saying, “Yeah, we’re working on a desmo five-cylinder 900, but it won’t be ready for a couple of years.” But that’s bad medicine, for it takes away from the allure of secrecy, and besides, you might not want to buy their side-valve long-stroke single in the meantime. So we gossipmongers have to weave and spin stories for you, the eager reader, which may turn out to be true later on, but which may also prove to have been pretty fairy tales, and nothing more.
There is a Kawasaki V-4. Honest. Some of my least unreliable sources claim to have seen the prototype machine running round test tracks here and there. But whether the company is going to start popping out 80-horsepower replicas of this machine like Dixie cups is another story. And I don’t know the end.
But it’s possible you won’t see the V-4, and it’s probable that even if they do go into production, it will be several years before you hear about it.
Kawasaki is working full-bore, trying to build enough current machines for the world market. They are already first in sales in many European countries. The Mach III was an enormous sales victory, and their off-road machines are going hard, too.
While the future of off-road motorcycles looks ever bigger, there is some uncertainty about new street machines. The safety hounds are closing in on motorcycles the way they clobbered cars, and there might be some nasty surprises one of these days, if fast, powerful street machines should suddenly get “Naderized” from behind.
Tooling up for and producing the new four-cylinder machine would represent close to a million-dollar investment, and it would have to compete head-on with the Honda Four. That would be quite a challenge. So there is naturally some amount of hesitation as to whether they should go ahead with the new machine. But if they do build the machine, be prepared to have a tourer you can set Bonneville records on without even taking off the mufflers.
SPEEDWAY BRIBE SCANDAL
Japan is the only country in the world where professional speedway events, complete with parimutuel betting, are held. It’s an exciting sport, and popular with tens of thousands of gamblers in this country. Racers make big money, but there is always the temptation to make it a little bigger.
“Four Racers Indicted,” said the English-language newspaper in Tokyo, and it went on, “Four motorcycle racers and a Tokyo non-ferrous metal dealer, involved in race riggings, were indicted by the Tokyo District Prosecutors’ Office Monday.
“The prosecutors are continuing their interrogation of former professional baseball players Tsutomu Tanaka, 30, and Isao Takayama, 28, and Hirotaka Fujinawa, 31, a former gangster and a key figure in the baseball scandals.”
The news value of these events lies in the fact that most folks in Japan still take honesty very seriously, especially in the big-time business of betting on horse, bicycle and motorcycle racers, and bribing is so rare as to be unknown here.
I plan to do an article on the fascinating world of pro speedway in Japan for a future issue of CYCFE WORFD.
POLLUTION CONTROL
While heavy political pressure from manufacturers has delayed the required installation of emission control devices in cars here, emission laws are soon to come, probably based on the stiff U.S. standards, and legislation concerning motorcycle emission cannot be far behind.
Two-strokes are somewhat guilty of expelling large amounts of hydrocarbons in the form of unburned fuel and oil, and machines with non-mix automatic lubrication are especially nasty, but commercially necessary, for American riders don’t like to have to mix oil with gas every time they fill up. Four-strokes, especially big ones, also put a lot of crud into the air.
Soichiro Honda spoke last year about this problem, and one of the most pleasant features of the engine design of the CB 750 is the swirl effect caused by the offset valves, which gives better and more complete combustion, and therefore less unburned stuff in the exhaust.
Two-stroke manufacturers have a much more difficult and critical problem to face, for the presence of the oil mist in the combustion chamber guarantees that loads of smoke will issue forth in a majestic cloud to sting the eyes and burn the throats of those behind. Companies here are conducting research mainly centered around the possibility of using afterburners, probably located somewhere in the header pipe or muffler system, which would more completely burn oil and gasoline. This is not an easy task for many reasons: size of the unit, method of re-igniting the exhaust, additional heat generated by the afterburner, and effects on the back-pressure wave necessary for highpower two-strokes. But they know they’ve got to develop something effective, and in a hurry, before we are all legislated into extinction.
And I have faith that they can do it, at least as well as is possible with gasoline-burning internal combustion engines. No one can seriously believe this type of engine, or this type of fuel, will be used forever; it’s too crude, too smelly, and too scarce. We all deeply love motorcycles, but we would love them with a more joyous abandon if they didn’t threaten to make the insides of our lungs look like the insides of our mufflers.
