Fast Forward
Fast Forward
Honda’s “out-of-the-box” concept bike
DAVID EDWARDS
APOLOGIES TO BEN -AMP;AMP; ERIC OF THE Mighty Mighty Bostroms, but the real star of the Laguna Seca World Superbike weekend never turned a wheel in anger. Instead, Honda’s NAS 1000 sat spiked to a pedestal in the Red Rider compound, surrounded three-deep by slackjaws and lookyloos while marketing-types hovered nearby, clipboards in hand, jotting down reactions. One smitten soul parted the crowds, Platinum Visa held high, demanding to plunk down a deposit.
Not so fast, bunky. At this point the “New American Sports” is merely a concept bike, a oneoff non-runner in fiberglass, billet, carbon-fiber, titanium and probably a little bondo. It’s the creation of HRA (Honda R&D Americas), the supersecret think-tank located on Honda’s sprawling Torrance, California, campus behind its own security fences, key-card entries and lots of video surveillance. HRA is not on the company tour.
Most of HRA’s handiwork you never see. Concepts are initiated, research is done, a series of design sketches made, clay models built, go/no-go meetings held-all very hush-hush, closed-door stuff.
But Honda wanted the NAS to be seen, and not just by the average motorcyclist, either. Complete for almost a year, the full-scale mockup could have been unveiled at any number of consumer shows or company-sponsored events. Instead, Honda waited until Laguna Seca, America’s biggest roadrace meet, with thousands of sportbike nutters in attendance, to strut its stuff.
So, what’s really going on here?
For one thing, you’re seeing the emergence of HRA in the shaping of future models, stepping out from the shadows of HGA (Honda R&D Japan), the company’s domestic design house. First evidence of this came late last year with the rolling out of three spectacular hot-rod styling treatments of the sixcylinder Valkyrie cruiser (see “Custom Fever,” CW, May, 2001).
“It’s time to step up,” an insider said. “Time for us to be seen as leaders, not just following HGA. We’d like them to look up to us.”
Fair to say that goal was well met with the NAS. The bike is built around a current VTR1000 Super Hawk motor, cosmetically spruced up with milled covers, a dry clutch and outsized waterpump housing. Its exhaust headers are plumbed into an aero-styled under-engine pod muffler similar in concept to a Buell’s, but much more artfully crafted in stainless-steel.
Mucking up the big V-Twin’s meaty looks with Hawk-style side-mount radiators was not going to happen, nor was there any easy way to fit a forward-facing unit, so the whole assembly was moved to the tailsection, laid down, cooling air ducted to it under the fuel tank and seat via one of the NAS’s prominent nostril intakes. The other intake routes air through a cartridge-style air filter, easily replaceable
For HRA Senior Designer Tonv Schroeder, who started the NAS Moieet m the winter of 1999, a V-Twin was the only real engine choice. “It’s narrow, it’s attractive and it’s got that deep, booming sound-it’s the nature of the beast,” the 31-year-old says. “It puts the mass in the middle, it’s got muscle, it’s all-business. Quite literally, it’s the engine that holds this bike together.”
Draped over and around the cylinders is an aluminum main frame, fairly conventional, with the exception of a steering head that measures maybe 6 inches across. Into this whacking great hole plugs a front suspension unit obviously inspired by a jet aircraft’s landing strut. Constructed of alloy and structural carbon-fiber, it houses its damping circuits and spring inside a jumbo, nitridecoated monoslider. A dial-
type steering damper atop the headstock can be adjusted on the fly, and the front axle is eccentrically mounted, allowing for adjustments in trail to suit a rider’s particular tastes in steering feel.
“Sometimes advanced engineering leads to new styling concepts, but in this case, the styling of the front suspension could lead to new, advanced engineering concepts,” says Martin ^Manchester, Schroeder’s boss at HRA. “We purposely ^yorked to push both the style and engineering . envelopes with this treatment.”
¡¿¡Everywhere you look on the NAS there are mechandts and styling licks to snag the eye. The waspish ction holding the radiator tray, its , -securing bum-stop meant to at a formula car’s air intake, front rim rotor gripped push11-you by a pair of calipers. The one-sided etonized” swingarm carrying the world’s sexirocket, a milled-from-billet wheel and a suitr substantial 200-section Pirelli. The ic, one-piece handlebar controls incorIng lever perch, switches and master f||er. The snarky, F-16ish nose-fairing, with its Intruding intake snouts, quad projector beams and Sndiglo” instrument illumination. This is high-tech as art, a rolling showcase for hardware, a gearhead’s dream ride. With one-sided suspension front and rear, I'iewed from the right the bike almost seems to leviitate, with no visible means of support.
fWe wanted to create emotion, to strengthen the rider’s connection to the motorcycle,” says Schroeder. flpo we gave the New American Sports a highly périmai, owner-directed allure by incorporating a superilevel of execution, using visible mechanical parts plat are highly stylized and finely finished.” jis not hard to imagine that had England’s Vincent jjpade it past mid-century, it might be building a roadburner not unlike the NAS-in black with gold pines, of course. Had cancer not taken the brilliant John Britten so early, the street version of his VI000 race Twin might have a similar silhouette. There’s a certain resemblance to the Sachs Beast showbike from last year’s Munich expo. And, yes, the NAS and the new Buell Firebolt have overlapping mission statements. In fact, Erik Buell, taking in the Laguna races following the SoCal intro of his XB9R, was overheard saying, “Great! Theirs is a concept, ours is going into production.”
Why this sudden move toward high-performance, high-style naked sportbikes? Consider it the Revenge of the Designers. Any new motorcycle is a threeway tug-o-war between engineering, design and marketing. As long as companies race
what they sell, sportbikes will largely be contained within a box that is engineering-driven. Race teams want lighter weight and more power, but are not terribly interested in R&D’ing, say, an alternate front suspension. It’s telling that Honda and Yamaha’s new four-stroke GP bikes, both cleansheet designs, are exceedingly conventional in running gear.
“If you look at the existing machines in today’s market, you see that the top-tier sportikes were designed by engineers for racing purposes,” says Schroeder. “Repli-racers own the spotlight. We wanted to set a new direction for sportbikes, back to the street rather than toward the racetrack. The market for race-style bikes is obviously strong, but we envisioned a different group of riders searching for a new category of sport machine. The vast majority of consumers spend their entire riding lives on the street, not the track, so it’s not necessary to establish racing function as the top priority for these riders.”
Likewise, cruisers have their own constricting box, mainly dictated by marketing. “American-style” retrobikes have their place, sure, but most industrial-design students did not spend long nights at their drafting tables, missing out on dormitory keggers, only later in life to pay homage to a 1936 EH Knucklehead.
Schroeder likes to point out that there was no engineering dossier for the NAS and that marketing got involved only after the mockup was built.
“We created our own box,” he says.
Could the NAS see showrooms any time soon? Certainly the bike is less pie-in-the-sky than other Honda showbikes we’ve seen. There’s no fluid drive, no automatic transmission, no personal, stair-walking robot to ride it for you. The only thing truly avant-garde is the front suspension, hardly beyond the capabilities of Honda’s engineers. To avoid terminal meltdown in summer stop-
n-go traffic, some kind of extraction fan would have to be devised-or because outright horsepower isn’t a priority, maybe a new-generation air-cooled Vee is the answer. Price would be a consideration. Or maybe not. Harley-Davidson will move every single one of the 11,000 V-Rods it plans to build for 2002, and good luck getting one of those out the door for less than $20K. “It’s a design study with no plans for production,” says Schroeder of the NAS. “But anything’s possible. I’d love to see it built-and it seems almost everyone who saw it at Laguna Seca would, too.”
If you believe the internet scuttlebutt, Honda will pull wraps off 10 new models at its September dealer convention. The New American Sports will not be among them. Pity.
