Bikes You Should Know: Honda CBX

Bikes You Should Know appears weekly as part of Two Wheel Tuesdays. Since Hooniverse primarily caters to automotive enthusiasts, this column focuses on historically or culturally significant motorcycles that are likely to interest a non-riding audience.

A couple of Two-Wheel Tuesdays ago, BYSK profiled Honda’s six-cylinder race bikes of the 1960s. As with many racing successes, the technology and style of those Grand Prix bikes was parlayed into a production machine. In this case, the journey took more than a decade, and the bike that showed up in European Honda dealers’ showroom floors in the Spring of 1978 (and in the USA the following October) was a very different machine in design, intent and scale than the racers of yore. The CBX was not the first six-cylinder street bike, and initially it was not a sales success. But but it did capture the riding public’s imagination in a special way that continues today.

THE BACKSTORY

This story sort of picks up where the earlier GP history ended. Honda introduced the CB750, then followed it up with a couple of very similar, smaller versions. As the seventies got underway in earnest, Honda was largely perceived to be sitting on their very innovative hands for several years. The GL1000 Gold Wing debuted, but it was a strange and unconventional machine. Had Honda lost their way? Internally, the corporate brass and R&D staff debated at length what direction should Honda go next. A new DOHC four was developed separately from and in parallel with a road-going six. The CBX team was led by Shochiro Irimajiri, designer of the ’60s racing sixes, but the end result had few technical details in common with its six-cylinder progenitors beyond the basic six cylinder, air-cooled, double overhead cam configuration. The biggest difference was scale: the 1047cc CBX was a fairly massive bike with 3.5X the displacement of the dimunitive racing six. “Iri” struggled to keep the mass of the new six reasonable.

WHAT HAPPENED

The CBX wowed the motorcycling press and public. It was crowned the fastest, most powerful production bike when it debuted, but just by a wisker’s breadth. While it was a legitimate player in the superbike wars, it did not dominate the competition. Most riders were impressed, but did not think the performance difference was worth the added expense and bulk those two extra cylinders added. Honda’s own CB900F four was a superior-handling racing platform. CBXes had to be heavily discounted to move them out of dealers’ showrooms. Honda quickly realized that its superbike six was a bike without an audience, and recast it as a gentleman’s express sport-tourer, but without greater sales success. After less than five years, production was halted and the CBX was retired.

WHY IT’S SIGNIFICANT

Cycle magazine summed up its initial road test of the CBX by saying, “The CBX is an immensely flattering bike with perfect elegance and total class, and history will rank it with those rare and precious motorcycles which will never, ever be forgotten.” And it has not been forgotten. The CBX is one of the most collectible of Japanese motorcycles. There is a fanatical, almost rabid international owners’ association. Much of the credit must go to the mystique of six cylinders, but the Benelli six that came before it and the Kawasaki six that followed do not enjoy the same devotion. The elegant, seamless “Honda-ness” of the the CBX’s function is also part of the reason, but the sculptural style of Iri’s pen must be credited with a great deal of the CBX’s iconic place in the pantheon of great bikes. I wrote in 2004 that, “Nearly all motorcycles have at least a few small details I wish had been addressed differently; not the CBX. There is no other motorcycle that I feel is so perfect, so unquestionably right in stock form.” I still feel that way today. Image Credit: “CBX_1000_arg.jpg” by Andrés Teixidó – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.