Dear Honda...
Dear Honda...
UP FRONT
David Edwards
I WRITE THIS LETTER NOT AS EDITOR-IN-Chief of the world’s largest-circulation monthly motorcycle magazine. Rather, please take it as a note from a concerned long-time Honda owner.
First, a decades-overdue thank you for introducing me to what is well on the way to a lifetime of streetbike riding. When I was 15, having graduated from a series of small dirtbikes, I purchased a pampered, one-year-old 1970 CB175; to my eyes then and now a beautiful, crisply styled machine made even more so by its deep candy-orange paint and sweeping chrome exhaust pipes.
I was an interminable six months short of having my driver’s permit, but the previous owner, a Navy man departing for a tour of duty in the waters off Vietnam, did me a huge favor by leaving his paid-up license tag in place. The bike was street-legal, even if I wasn’t.
My weekend routine was to push the CB to the woods at the end of our street, telling my folks I was going “trail riding,” then link up with asphalt on the other side of the trees. From there, I had access to hundreds of miles of rural Maryland backroads. Lightly trafficked and patrolled, thankfully.
Armed with a teenager’s sense of immortality, I learned how to drag the centerstand in corners, then the footpegs, then the mufflers. I learned that a 20-horsepower ohc Twin would do an indicated 90 mph, but only if you used the passen ger pegs and crouched low like the leatherdads in the magazines.
Downhill straights were bliss, God’s own nitrous-injection.
On the way back home through the forest, I made sure to splash some mud on the pristine 175 to keep up the trail-riding ruse. I then made a big production of washing it every Sunday afternoon. Polishing the tank was always the highlight; dollops of paste wax laid on and swirled around by hand so as to not risk grit or hardened wax on the applicator pad scratching the paint. Besides, my practiced fingers knew to keep wax off the rubber knee pads and out of the enameled Honda wing badge. To this day, 36 years later, I can still feel the shapes and creases and angles of that gas tank. An old soft T-shirt, washed 1000 times, put the final buff on the tank, which seemed to glow orange from within in the setting sunlight.
After becoming legal and outgrowing the 175, next came a CB350, only the most popular bike in the world in the mid-1970s. Put 30,000 good miles on that one. When at age 19, I decided to drop out of aerospace-engineering school and become the next Marty Smith, a 1975 CR125 Elsinore was my weapon of choice. A 10 percent discount on parts at Ken Dixon Honda was as close as I ever got to a factory contract, but that little bike gave me one of my most vivid, almost transcendental, motorcycle memories.
Lined up for the first moto at a Virginia track, I was suddenly overcome by a deep calmness. When the rubber startline band flew, everything clicked into slow motion, my vision narrowed to a tunnel ahead, every rock, pebble and dirt clod in super-sharp focus. Bumps went unfelt, whoops were wheelied through with ease, every berm cradled my wheels and caromed me ahead. It was as if there were no other bikes on the track that day. I remember my brother Kevin trackside, big smile plastered, arms outstretched as far as they could go, indicating my lead.
Years later, I purchased an old 1970 CB750 KO and rode it from Illinois to California along the remains of Route 66 for a Cycle World feature. Afterward I had it restored, and was immensely honored in 1998 when you Honda folks asked if you could borrow it for your 50th-anniversary festivities in New York City. I was in the audience beaming proudly when it was ridden up onto the stage at Radio City Music Hall.
Looking back, I’ve almost never been without a Honda. Still own the K Zero, parked in my garage between a magnificent, low-mileage 1982 CBX Six sporttourer once part of the late Dave Mungenast’s collection and an absolute deathtrap of a CB350 chopper (not your fault).
As a fan of the brand, then, I was a little dismayed to see your 2008-model lineup. All due respect, but other than the potent new CBR1000RR (see page 52) nicely bookending your class-leading CBR600RR, where’s the excitement? New saddlebags for the 1300 don’t exactly ignite a fireworks display of July Fourth dimensions over yourVTX cruisers. No adventure-bikes, even though Europe gets a tasty new revamp on the VTwin Transalp. And with the demise of the 919, no standard-style bike?! From the company that ushered in the era of the across-the-frame inline-Four?
But just as that was digesting poorly, you let advance photos of three Tokyo Motor Show concept bikes loose on the Internet, the (top to bottom) Evo 6, a modern roadster powered by the Gold Wing’s pancake-Six, the CB1100R, an homage to the factory RCB1000 endurance racers, and the CB 1100F, a retro café-racer. Faith restored.
It’s the latter, the HOOF, that speaks to me loudest, if only because it looks so close to production. The tranverse-Four is your engine, your heritage, and here it is in air-cooled glory, no radiator or water hoses mucking up the view. And look what’s on display! A wavy-gravy array of four header pipes, a la the old CB400F, terminating in a proper megaphone-style muffler. To many of us, that is what an exhaust system should look like. Extrapolating, this is what a motorcycle should look like, too.
Build that bike, Honda. Make mine candy-orange if you please...
