Inside Legendary Honda V-4!

Cycle World

Honda's VF750F arrived in 1982 with is square-tube steel frame that elevated the motorcycling handling game to new heights and launched a production V-4 dynasty at Honda. AMA Superbike championships followed as did many remarkable motorcycles including VF1000R, RC30, RC45, VFR750, 800, and 1200, plus the amazingly exotic oval-piston NR750. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer discuss the origins of the V-4 and its successes and failures.   Looking to buy? Get prequalified https://octane.co/flex/1?a=171  Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/ Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld

Transcript

00:00:00Welcome back to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm the Editor-in-Chief.

00:00:05Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Cameron, Technical Editor, is here yet again. We're happy to say

00:00:10today's topic, is this near and dear to my heart? It is. I owned one. It was the first

00:00:17motorcycle I bought new. It's the Honda Interceptor and the VFR. So it's the V4s.

00:00:24And, you know, foundationally, Kevin will certainly let us know the handling was really

00:00:33the step for that bike in the early 80s, 82, 83. Kind of changed the game. What I like

00:00:42about Kevin's notes, however, is that they start in 1902 Lavasseurs V4, as ever. Let's

00:00:51get back to it. So kick us off, Kevin. Well, the big question is, why would a major corporation

00:01:01want to suddenly begin backing liquid-cooled V4s after having made almost exclusively air-cooled

00:01:15in lines? And part of the story relates to Honda's position in the period when they were putting

00:01:26all their effort into developing their automotive line. That began when the classic era in Grand

00:01:34Grand Prix racing, 1959 to 1967, came to an end. Honda had been planning four-wheeled products ever since

00:01:451954, or thereabouts. But it had sucked up all the engineering talent into the car division.

00:01:57The motorcycle racing was over for the moment. And while this was happening, Yamaha,

00:02:06as will happen in business, saw an opportunity. Honda is busy elsewhere. Let's take the market.

00:02:15So they got busy trying to do that. And at a point, Honda management saw that this wasn't going to do it

00:02:27all. We're not going to just sit here and let you people take the market that we created,

00:02:37which arguably Honda did. They became the world's largest producer in the early 60s and stayed that way

00:02:47for a long time. So in order to reassert the technical, I guess the technical big bike

00:02:59performance market really was for the mass, mass market was CB 750, as you're basically pointing out.

00:03:05And that was, I mean, wildly, wildly successful and, and a dominant flag in the ground. But here we are.

00:03:16Yes. And it took a while for everybody else to kind of catch up. You know, I mean, Suzuki was doing

00:03:20rotaries and stuff and unbelievable. Yeah. And, and even Yamaha in the seventies, you know,

00:03:26with their shaft drive, 1100 triples and they were motorcycles that were neither here nor there.

00:03:32They had very little identifiable character, but they made a lot of them. And let's bear in mind that

00:03:42the lesson that identity is central to motorcycle sales is forgotten over and over again, and then

00:03:51rediscovered. And, uh, Harley Davidson were ready to produce the Nova, imagining they was going to,

00:04:02they were going to compete with Japan. And their ad agency said, Oh guys, look,

00:04:08look, you've got something that no one else can ever have. You're American, right back to the

00:04:18beginning. You're the nationalist motorcycle here in the USA. And they, Oh yeah, that's, that's right.

00:04:29Let's, let's, let's push that. And they pushed it wonderfully. But, uh, Honda needed to make some

00:04:37big statements in the market, such as the, uh,

00:04:40the, uh, uh, uh, Shoichiro Eremadri's CBX inline six, which of course was, um,

00:04:51uh, a re a production, um, ideation of the, of the six cylinder 250 on which Mike Hillwood won

00:05:02two 250 world championships, 1966 and 67, um, taking magnificent. Yes. Taking the title from, uh,

00:05:13Phil Reed, who'd had it for two years previous on an air cooled Yamaha. So, uh,

00:05:21Honda, I think impressed themselves as much as they impressed the rest of us. Oh, we're so big.

00:05:27We could do anything. And, uh, they, they put their shoulders to the wheel to recover

00:05:37and to reassert their, uh, preeminence. And one of the things that they decided they must do

00:05:45is to reenter Grand Prix racing. And they were going to do it by golly with a four stroke engine.

00:05:53Now, uh, uh, Mr. Eremadri waiting at a traffic light supposedly had the, uh, the inspiration that

00:06:06an oval piston could provide even more valve area than the most extremely over square, uh,

00:06:16bore and stroke dimensions. So this concept was adopted, but because the piston was long this way

00:06:28and short this way, it would have been pretty difficult to make an inline four with oval pistons

00:06:37because the original, um, was something like 94.3 millimeters wide. Whereas a round piston of the

00:06:46same area would have been 66 millimeters. So you've got 30 millimeters on each of four holes added to the

00:06:54width. So, all right, what about a V4? V4s had been done before, but not in motorcycling to any

00:07:06um, notable extent. I believe Ducati built the, uh, a monstrous V4 that, uh, might be named at the

00:07:18US police market. I don't know. Uh, but it went nowhere. So also Mr. Eremadri had the example of the great, um,

00:07:32Grand Prix bikes, some of which he designed. And he knew that in the last year, 1967,

00:07:39the 500 CCRC 181 had some crank slippage, press joints, slipping, um, bad effect.

00:07:51And in, in, in developing the oval piston NR 500 as a V4, they became familiar with had their noses

00:08:07or entire faces rubbed in the fact that a very short crankshaft is more stable at high RPM

00:08:14than a longer one. That's why all the, uh, from 1900 to 1910, the Grand Prix automobiles had four

00:08:24cylinders. Rarely were six cylinders tried because it had awful torsional oscillations. So

00:08:33this is one of the things that I believe that Mr. Eremadri noticed about the V4 was that it was

00:08:40inherently more suited to high RPM from the standpoint of crankshaft durability because the

00:08:46crankshaft was short, just as the four cylinder crankshafts in auto racing before 1910 were only

00:08:54two thirds the length of a six. So this would be an important thing. Now the NR 500, uh, was

00:09:10the source of many innovations which would later be seen in production, such as the upside down fork,

00:09:17side radiators, um, many other, uh, innovations of that kind would be, uh, brought forth. Oh,

00:09:28we could use this. Lots of VFRs were made with side radiators. So, uh,

00:09:35uh, the NR 500 was regarded within Honda as being, oh, well, it was not successful in racing,

00:09:45but it was successful in innovation in that it forced them to look at the V4 concept

00:09:54from all directions. So they said, uh, V4 is more like a ball than it is like, uh, an inline four,

00:10:08which is like a suitcase. So the ball like engine is able to be rotated in any direction

00:10:18with less resistance to that rotation because it's radius is small. On the other hand,

00:10:26any V engine is longer this way than an inline engine. So, uh, it was easier to make an inline

00:10:37engine located far forward in the chassis resist wheelies and thus accelerate faster than in the

00:10:45case of the V4, which had to be sort of in the center of the chassis and couldn't go up against

00:10:51the front wheel and concentrate mass there. Um, and of course,

00:11:01Honda management wanted to do something definitively different for their,

00:11:08I'm going to give you a black eye, Yamaha. And the V4 was the chosen concept. Now I've,

00:11:18I've tried to find out where that decision may have been made and I have failed to find out, uh,

00:11:26what that was, um, who said what to whom in which room. But in any case, uh, an engineer,

00:11:36Isao Yamanaka was charged with being the large project leader for the initial V4, uh, engines.

00:11:46And it had to be water cooled because you cannot cool the second row of a two row engine

00:11:56with hot air coming off of the cooling fins of the front cylinders. That doesn't work.

00:12:03A.J.S. tried that in 1935-36 with their little V4, 500 cc's. And they had to reduce the compression

00:12:14ratio on the rear cylinders to keep it from detonating as a result of being in quotes, cooled with hot air.

00:12:24So, um, eventually that engine, a Burt Collier design was, uh, redesigned for liquid cooling.

00:12:35Honda had the advantage of beginning with liquid cooling, no messing about with fins and lowered

00:12:42compression and all the other problems that A.J.S. had. So,

00:12:45the, uh, first V4s into the production were, came out in 82. Simultaneously in 82,

00:12:59in the spring of the year, they brought the V4 1000 cc FWS 1000. And it made just short of 150 horsepower.

00:13:13And it was very fast. Um, it also tore up tires. And one of the innovations that came out of that

00:13:26particular thing was the idea of, of changing tires at Daytona, which has happened ever since.

00:13:34But that particular Daytona race, 1982, was won by Graham Crosby riding an OW31 Yamaha, zero W31,

00:13:46pardon me, built out of the parts room. Now that was a motorcycle designed to win Daytona. So it's no

00:13:55surprise that it did well. Uh, Honda was stopped by tire trouble. They had two excellent riders,

00:14:02Freddy Spencer and Mike Baldwin, uh, who made life hard for the scorers because,

00:14:10oh, he's in the pits. No, he's running again. Now, which lap was that?

00:14:14But in the end, uh, the V4 concept was, uh, made viable in a big way in 1983 by Honda's Interceptor 750,

00:14:30which had a square tube, a steel square tube chassis of unparalleled rigidity,

00:14:39even though it was a conventional twin loop design.

00:14:43And it's considerable weight was emphasized by fabricator, Todd Schuster, stepping into a

00:14:52bare frame and pulling it up like a pair of pants while commenting that this is the second heaviest

00:14:57frame in all of racing, the heaviest being the 1953 Hudson. So

00:15:03despite its weight of over 500 pounds, this thing dominated us super bike. Um, I think it won five

00:15:15championships and in the form of RC 30, also a V4 750. Uh, it won the first two championships in world

00:15:31super bike. And it did so as a result of its strong acceleration.

00:15:37Ducati at the time were playing with, uh, what would, could be called Cosworth valve timings,

00:15:46lots of duration, which makes power on top, but kills the mid range in the bottom.

00:15:52So while the Ducati fellows were trying to ride corner speed,

00:15:57so they didn't have to accelerate as much, the RC 30s were winning a couple of championships based on

00:16:05good acceleration. Now that's not a result of a V4 engine.

00:16:11It's the result of designing an engine that has good mid range and for strong acceleration.

00:16:19The cylinder doesn't know where the other cylinders are. It's doing its thing.

00:16:23And if it's, if it's filling itself well in the mid range, you're going to have good acceleration.

00:16:34So I think it's an important, it's kind of the important galactic point is that

00:16:39everyone says torquey American V twins. Well, it's a result of tuning. It's a result of boring stroke.

00:16:44It has, you know, like you can make, you can make it as Ducati has done. You can make V twins

00:16:49rev very high and make no torque for very, very little. It's all about the cylinder breathing

00:16:56and the valve area and, you know, American V twins.

00:16:59But there still are people who argue that a long stroke by itself means lots of torque.

00:17:05Well, what a long stroke generally means is a small bore. And a small bore means small valves,

00:17:12which have their peak flow in the mid range and not on top. This gives us the shed roof

00:17:21torque curve, which Harley two valve engines for so many years had lots of torque at the bottom,

00:17:28and then a slow decline until around 5,000 RPM. It's.

00:17:34Yeah. And you can only make up, you can only make up for that with so much lift.

00:17:39Yeah. Take the valve out. Yeah.

00:17:43You're theoretically, you can say, oh, let's give it two inches of lift instead of a half inch of lift,

00:17:47two inches of lift. But you know, the hole is only so big and the hole is only so big.

00:17:53And so that's why long strokes have small bores and their torque comes from those small valves

00:18:00and small ports, which you can give to any engine. So, uh, this.

00:18:11In 2020, I was, uh, invited to go on a deluxe trip to Honda in Japan and which I enjoyed very much.

00:18:21And at one point the question was put to, uh, then development director, Tetsuiro Wakabayashi,

00:18:32why are you building Fireblade as an inline four when you're racing a V4 in MotoGP?

00:18:41Hmm. So he said, very good question, but he said, sales are not so great now. I would like to have

00:18:55both V4 and inline four, but now we can only afford one. So, uh, the V4 can be looked at as having a

00:19:08career that, uh, peaked quite early and which then and later encountered both from Honda and from other

00:19:20manufacturers competing sport bikes that made it difficult for the quite heavy VFR to compete

00:19:31nose to nose. And so VFR was gradually, uh, pushed towards the role of the gentleman's express

00:19:46a motorcycle with a strong sporting performance, but a normal riding position and some tour capabilities.

00:19:56And it crushed by the way, it was, I mean, what a magnificent motorcycle that picked up

00:20:03gear driven cams, which we all at the time were dying for. Oh, love the wine. Yes.

00:20:09It just sounded, sounded, you know, it sounded like the future. It sounded like performance because it

00:20:14was, it was performance. It, it, it gave you advantages. It had a beautiful precision to it. None of this,

00:20:21you know, flapping chains, stretching chains. I mean, and the, you know, the complexity of

00:20:28just building a V4 costs you more money. You got two cylinder heads. You have to drive

00:20:33two cam drives. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, there's this extra, extra complication, which Honda was not afraid

00:20:41of. That was, there was a beautiful time at Honda where it seemed like, how can we think of a more

00:20:48complex solution for this simple problem? You know, that's, it was awesome. I bought a 1995 VFR,

00:20:55uh, was that a gen four, um, brand new. That was the first motorcycle I bought brand new.

00:21:02I kind of wanted a 900 SS Ducati just cause they were highly lauded by everyone magazines. Uh,

00:21:10uh, so it just, uh, yeah, just, um, I made the sort of semi-rational choice of buying the Honda because

00:21:21I wasn't afraid of its, uh, valve gear so much. Although working on carburetors on a V4 was,

00:21:27you know, they're stuffed in the middle there. It's getting, getting all four into those rubber.

00:21:34Yes. Um, but yeah, what, uh, what, what a motorcycle kind of dynasty it it's one, uh,

00:21:43the VFR won many 10 best bikes awards for its, its balance of performance and smoothness. And,

00:21:50uh, you know, the first time I had to change tires on my VFR, so he had a single sided swing arm. It was,

00:21:56uh, you know, it was inspired by RC 30. I couldn't afford an RC 30 and, and I don't, would I want to

00:22:04daily ride an RC 30 was the other question, even if I could afford it, but the VFR took care of all

00:22:09that. It was very plush. It was very comfortable. I wore the tires out and I went to change the tires,

00:22:15single sided swing arm, pop it on a center stand for lug nuts, roll the wheel out. But you, uh, you

00:22:20need to kind of take the exhaust off to get the wheel. So it, it just unbolts big, big flange.

00:22:26And I was standing there and I was like, huh, well now this sounds without the muffler on it.

00:22:30And you know what? It sounds fricking awesome. It was so good. I lit it up in the parking garage

00:22:37at, uh, at cycle news where I was working at the time and I rev the daylights out of it.

00:22:42And it was clearly audible. Oh, all the other editors came down and said, what is this wonderful sound?

00:22:49It was good. But, um, yeah, a real dynasty for that. And, uh,

00:22:53uh, that trip in 2020, you did, that was, that was a tour of HRC. Not only, not only did you get

00:23:00access to the people, you got to see the shop, everybody was out doing things in Southeast

00:23:06Asia doing testing. Um, but it was just a long room with a lot of lifts, just like a repair shop.

00:23:15And, uh, you could imagine technicians wheeling engines in on little carts and, um,

00:23:23people wondering, wondering, wondering where the 10 millimeter socket is just like people.

00:23:31Yeah. Just like people. So, uh, one of the highlights of, of that trip for me was a definitive,

00:23:44um, reasoning in favor of the V four as a race engine, because at that time, uh,

00:23:53everyone, but Yamaha had adopted the V four in Moto GP and, uh, the LPL on that, uh, 2020

00:24:04Fireblade was, uh, Yuzuru Ishikawa. And he told me straight out, he said, I am an inline guy.

00:24:14I like inline engines. And he said, inline is ideal for world super bike. The Fireblade was

00:24:23sort of a homologation special for that class. And he said there, uh, rev limits are all below 16,000.

00:24:32And the inline crankshaft is stable up to 16,000. But above that, it needs help.

00:24:43It needs crankshaft dampers. It may need dampers to control the motions of the cam drives. Anyway,

00:24:52he said the V four crankshaft being as short as it is, has three main bearings, two crank pins.

00:25:00Um, where the inline four has five main bearings and four crank pins,

00:25:08but the V four crankshaft is stable to 18,000.

00:25:17And Honda have lots of experience in stabilizing crankshafts in formula one engines. You can be

00:25:24sure the other formula one constructors have similar experience, but what's happening at very

00:25:30high speed in those racing engines? And by high speed, I mean 20,000 is that the parts have so much

00:25:39energy in their motion that they can so easily destroy themselves. The frequencies of parts become

00:25:49the most interesting thing about them, not how much they weigh or the diameters or the bearing

00:25:55clearances, but they're vibratory modes. And this is starting to, to be the case with racing tires.

00:26:04They don't just chatter where the whole tread band moves back and forth, but they they're able to do

00:26:11strange, sinuous motions. And I'd like to know more about that, but I can't.

00:26:17But for sure, uh, the short crankshaft of the V four engines is a real advantage.

00:26:30And what is it going to do? It's going to move the frequency higher, right?

00:26:35Yes. Yes. Because I mean, if we look at it, short and stiff. Yeah. A torsional spring, you know,

00:26:42like a torsion bar front suspension, like on a 1964 E type coupe, uh, you have, uh, a long bar and it's

00:26:51flexible. And if you make the bar the same diameter, the same material, you make it longer, it'll have more

00:26:57flexibility and it'll tend to tend to displace more. So, uh, inline six camshafts, again,

00:27:04using Jaguar as a reference or Aston Martin, these great, big, long camshafts and on an Aston Martin,

00:27:13like the, the DB engine, um, DB four 3.7 liter aluminum block, the distributors on the tail end

00:27:23of one of the cams. I think it's the intake cam. And so the drive is, is, is like three feet away

00:27:29through a really long torsional spring. Yep. And, uh, you would definitely end up struggling

00:27:37with a spark scatter if you were really trying to rev the daylights out of it. Cause that long camshaft

00:27:42and the long crankshaft, that was a seven main engine. And, uh, you know, it's not going to be

00:27:49as stable as a stubby little crank in a V4. And the extreme in the case of, of a torsion bar is a,

00:27:56is an, an oil drilling drill string. You've got two and a half miles of pipe down into the hole

00:28:05on the bottom end is Hughes tool company's finest, uh, set of teeth for chewing rock.

00:28:12And if that bit jams,

00:28:17the top of the drill string may rotate 10 or 15 times before they put on the brakes and realize that

00:28:26we've got a jam because that's a really long torsion bar. And it's quite torsionally flexible.

00:28:32Whereas the V4 crankshaft is, is short and it has a lot of torsional stability so that

00:28:39it has to be spinning faster to get excited. Yeah. In destructive ways.

00:28:45I mean, strictly speaking, a coil spring is a torsion bar that's been coiled up. Yep. Yep.

00:28:52So if we think about it long enough, which I think we have,

00:28:55we have. I think we have, Kevin. We have. Yes. So, uh, RC 30, uh, supposedly Udo Giedel,

00:29:05who was, uh, running things at Honda's race team for a while in the U S saying, finally, thank God that

00:29:13I don't have to work with the 50 mile flat, flat to it anymore with the cases that are breathing.

00:29:19Watch the podcast we did on Udo's, uh, super bike R90s, uh, the AMA was of course, um, still had their

00:29:30feet in the class C pass, which meant you will ride your production bike to the track, remove the

00:29:37headlight and taillight and race. And as with every book of laws that has been written by the human hand,

00:29:50the moment it publishes people start saying, yeah, but well, what if we, so, so much for law.

00:30:01It's, um, RC 30 had a chassis of its time. The steering head was incredibly rigidly braced

00:30:12and that bike had a reputation for no front end feel, which is characteristic of a very stiff chassis.

00:30:19But they developed that engine beginning at a point where it came on the torque at 7,500.

00:30:28They kept souping it up more valve lift, more, more of everything until the engine was coming

00:30:36on the torque curve at 10,500. And then they said, oh, uh, we need a necessary new engine

00:30:43engine because this one has reached its peak and is obsolete. There was no place to go. And it was,

00:30:51had become very hard to ride. So RC 45 came along. Not everyone could ride it. Um, Miguel de la

00:30:59Mello was one of them and John Kosinski won a single, uh, world supers title on it in 97.

00:31:08But what happened next?

00:31:09Next, Honda's looking around at all these Ducati championship wins in world superbike

00:31:19and Ducatis are invading the U S superbike. Maybe we should be building V twins. Now,

00:31:26those are looking pretty good. So RC 51 was built the V twin thousand CC

00:31:37Honda superbike on which Colin Edwards jr. One, two supers championships.

00:31:43Yeah. At Monza in 2000, he was, I went to Monza. Uh, it was when Troy Bayless got kicked up on the

00:31:51Ducati team. Uh, he was plucked out of Anson Heinz because Carl Fogarty had broken his, uh,

00:31:58humorous and, uh, uh, David Tardazzi. We pray to God to heal the bone is what he said in the paddock

00:32:05to me about, about foggy. And I don't know how much David Tardazzi prayed for that after watching

00:32:12Bayless do what he did on that Ducati. Yeah. Uh, they just recently, uh, world superbike just

00:32:19recently showed that video of him passing four guys into one of the chicanes and making the corner,

00:32:26which Bayless said, I said, Troy, like, how did you like your, like he just got on the bike.

00:32:33He just got on Michelins. He had no background to speak of with, with Michelin tires. And at the time

00:32:40it was Michelins have more grip, but they're less, uh, communicative. So they let go, uh, more

00:32:45surprisingly, but he just went in. I said, how'd you do that? And he's like,

00:32:49I reckon I just squeeze a bit hotter, mate. I was like, okay, very nice answer. Very laid back.

00:32:55But, uh, there he was. So that, that was the interview, uh, the opportunity to interview

00:33:01Colin racing the RC 51. Yeah. And, uh, I said, well, what do you like about it? And he's like, well,

00:33:08it doesn't try to kill me when I enter any corner as much as the RC 45 did. Yeah. He said it would

00:33:16turn it had, it was much more willing to turn than the RC 45 had been. And the important distinction

00:33:22also is thousand CC. So that was a really neat time. RC 51 and, uh, Suzuki doing the TL 1000. Um,

00:33:32you know, in, in AMA in the late nineties, you know, uh, Suzuki was showing up with, God, it seemed like

00:33:38like 4,000 CCV twins and four, four, seven 54 is like, what do we do? What do we try? Let's yeah.

00:33:50How's this going to turn out? Let's just keep messing around. It was, it was beautiful to see all that

00:33:54investment. Someone interviewed Mr. Yamanaka who was associated with so many motorcycles, but VFR for sure,

00:34:03uh, uh, late in his career. And he said, it's hard to imagine the future since nearly everything has been

00:34:13tried. So, uh, it's interesting to relate that at the very end of the career of RC 45, they decided to

00:34:25put the oil into the ends of the crankshaft. Prior to that, it was lubricating its connecting rods by

00:34:35bleeding oil off of the main bearings through drillings in the crankshaft. That meant that oil

00:34:43had to flow from outside the crankshaft radially inward against so-called centrifugal force with, uh,

00:34:53uh, RC 45, which turned astronomical revolutions. The bearings were, the rod bearings were streaking

00:35:03black just as they had always done with our C 30. And they'd never had a complete failure, but it was

00:35:13like fate was in there with a, with a dark magic marker, making these lines to say, you guys don't know

00:35:22everything, do you? Well, and how could you, if you're an engine builder, how could you live with

00:35:28that idea? You'd have to be like, yeah, you got to do something. We can't, you can't leave this.

00:35:34So they tried up to a, they tried a hundred pounds of oil pressure and no different black streaks.

00:35:42And how much horsepower would that take?

00:35:43So, uh, okay. He said, we will now adopt formula one practice, which is end feed.

00:35:54And lots of motorcycle engines now have end feed. BMW has built them. Uh, lots of people have built

00:36:02them. So they adopt end feed and they find all they need is 12 PSI.

00:36:09Because now the oil is coming in at the center of the crankshaft and being flung outward to the

00:36:17connecting rod bearings on the crankpins. And, um, Mr. Gary Mathers said, who, who was, uh, the

00:36:30always innovative and sometimes overly talkative, uh, director of American Honda racing.

00:36:37He said, the engines came with tags on them saying 12 PSI oil pressure is all this engine

00:36:47needs. It is normal. This is not a problem because everyone was so focused on, well, we've,

00:36:56we've got to find a way to get more oil oil in there. It's going to take more pressure.

00:37:01So it was interesting to learn from, um, Mr. Ishikawa LPL on the 2020 Fireblade that they were,

00:37:11of course, that's four cylinders long. They're putting oil in both ends of the crankshaft.

00:37:17Formula one style, uh, late model RC 45 style. So

00:37:24you can't produce a line of engines of this kind without learning a great deal along the way.

00:37:34One of the early lessons, one of the early lessons was supposedly that a, an automated assembly system

00:37:43was pioneered by early VFRs. I don't know if this is the case or not, but for some reason oil was very

00:37:53slow in reaching the very end of one of the camshafts. And I remember, uh, Paul Dean telling

00:38:00me that he timed it once something like seven minutes for oil pressure to reach after cold

00:38:07start and all sorts of kits of external oil lines. And here's the modification. If you do this,

00:38:14you'll never have another kind of another trouble again. Honda had to scramble to correct this problem

00:38:21because it was a torpedo that was rushing toward the motorcycle engine that was supposed to

00:38:28be the tip of the spear of Honda's resurgence. Sit down, Yamaha. We're going to take the top box.

00:38:38And yeah, you, you have to work for, uh, supremacy. And I like to think of, of late night

00:38:51operations at HRC and other places where testing goes on. And I've talked to people who

00:39:01US superbike team would go to Japan and learn about the engine by building their own.

00:39:09And they said, uh, even though we're in the last year of RC 45 operations,

00:39:18was that it would be 98, I suppose they were running tests of valve train components for that engine

00:39:30at night. So that means a lot of test facilities booked up.

00:39:37So hands on, it's how you get rid of frame error. Like what you were talking about where your reference,

00:39:45your reference is wrong. And so you have all this experience of engines that need 40,

00:39:5050, 60 PSI of oil pressure. And then you get this one and like, oh man, it's got 12 pounds.

00:39:55They must've screwed this up. Like, like, what do we do? And you go and you fix something. Um,

00:40:03um, you know, torque, torque values, uh, you know, little like clutch springs. I just recently had

00:40:10this experience with my XS 650. I did a clutch and my 72 Yamaha and whoever put that together

00:40:18torqued the daylights out of those little, like, what are they? Like the shanks, like three

00:40:23millimeter, four millimeter or something. Yeah. Just the little bolts that hold the springs on. They're

00:40:28supposed to be seven foot pounds, roughly seven to nine foot pounds. And whoever put those in there,

00:40:33tighten them so much that it cracked the boss of the clutch. And you're just like, it's not an axle.

00:40:39And then actually it has, you know, it has a spring washer if we think about it. So it's just,

00:40:44you have this reference of only the only things that you've experienced. And then you're confronted

00:40:49with something that violates that, something that violates that your rules. And it's been,

00:40:56it's been tested. That's what's so great about finding the answers for yourself, taking things

00:41:03apart and looking at the bearings, taking measurements, measuring. It takes seven seconds

00:41:09for the oil pressure to get to the end of that camp or seven minutes to get to the end of that cam

00:41:13shaft, like visualizing it and saying, okay, well, where's the oil pump? How do we, you know,

00:41:20can we put it, can we put a light ball check valve to keep the oil from draining out of this? Like,

00:41:24how do we solve it? You know, and, and actually measuring things. That's what's,

00:41:29that's, what's always driven me to take things apart is that I have confidence in what I'm dealing

00:41:36with. Like I, I put it back together and I know for sure it's like a, I know it's very mundane.

00:41:43The power steering pump on a 1989 Ford, it's a vane type pump. It's got a big plastic reservoir and the

00:41:51rebuild kits, you know, like six O rings and a shaft seal and a few, a few other bits. And if

00:41:56you have a quiet one, you don't trade that in for something that someone else has rebuilt,

00:42:00you rebuild it yourself and you just figure it out. Right. And then you know what you have. And I,

00:42:07that confidence is what I find, I find necessary. And so it's, it's neat that they would

00:42:15that fundamental to Honda success. They're taking the team to build the engines like themselves for

00:42:26their team. Yeah. Well, the combustion chamber for RC 30 was highly refined for its time. It was based

00:42:34on research. The RC 45 combustion chamber, um, was a step forward when RC 211 V the V five, uh,

00:42:47Moto GP engine that Honda ran from 2002 to 2006, uh, was based on RC 45 combustion chambers.

00:42:58And one of these Japanese gentlemen said, we have invested a great deal of research in making

00:43:08something that works well. Why would we throw that away and start over again? Let's use something

00:43:15that we already have and have confidence in its performance. So. Oh, that's, that's the playbook

00:43:22over at Polaris, man. You get a combustion chamber that works and they stick it on everything,

00:43:26right? Like you don't have to reinvent and it's just, yeah, they've got like a million repetitions

00:43:33for this combustion chamber and we know what it does. Let's put it over here. And at one point,

00:43:38uh, they put V tech on VFR and V tech, um, is a, this particular V tech, uh, a variable valve timing system

00:43:53involved having three cam lobes. And two of the cam lobes, the outer pair operate the, uh, two valves

00:44:03at lower speeds. They may have staggered opening, which can produce axial swirl. If it starts to

00:44:12blow out of one, it's like when you play with the hose, filling a bucket, you can make the water spin.

00:44:17Um, waiting for a bucket to fill is one of those experiences that you wouldn't want to repeat too

00:44:27often. So in order to while away the, the minutes you play a game. And so those outer two lobes are

00:44:37designed to make the bottom end punchy and to boost intake velocity to improve cylinder filling when the

00:44:46engine is not on the boil. And then, uh, depending on what year, the first ones, uh, switched over at

00:44:557,000. Then it was 6,800. Then it was 6,400. Suddenly at some point in the operation, a pin is hydraulically

00:45:05shot through all three rocker arms, causing them to be operated by the center lobe, which is the high

00:45:12performance lobe. And, uh, uh, this is one of those things like shift cam at BMW, um, and other such

00:45:23inventions that when you have played out your ability to have, have it all strong off the bottom,

00:45:32good mid range acceleration, breathtaking top speed. When, when you can't budge the compromise any further,

00:45:43throw the compromise out and have one cam profile for idle to 6,400 and another one for 6,400

00:45:54onward. And certainly such a device takes engineering, but that's what Honda have always had.

00:46:07Then along comes, uh, the gray men of Brussels implementing, uh, Euro five in January 1st,

00:46:162020 with a one year, um, one year before new models, uh, that don't comply will be banned.

00:46:29So for 2021 Honda had to look at, are we going to keep making this? Where are we going to put the larger,

00:46:39uh, catalyst, uh, catalyst mufflers? How are we going to deal with sound? How are we going to

00:46:51make an antique design modern? Maybe that's not a good idea anymore.

00:47:01Let's let it go.

00:47:02Well, it would cost a lot.

00:47:04Yeah, it would cost a lot. And it was always costing more because, uh, two cylinders to two

00:47:11groups of two cylinders makes tooling more difficult rather than just having four in a row.

00:47:18And, uh, two cam drives, two of so many things. So 21,

00:47:27one, finito, end of story. But there are still so many, what I would call VFR people who

00:47:36really enjoyed and continue to enjoy. My middle son has one, uh, rides it all over the place. I think

00:47:44it's a 98. And, uh, that's quite an accomplishment to have a motorcycle that is still widely in service

00:47:54and is enjoyed and admired by many people. Good going. I say, yeah, it was, uh, it was its own kind

00:48:07of sub brand. It really established its own thing. It's like Goldwing, you know, Goldwing has evokes

00:48:13these ideas of riding to Yuma from LA and an easy ones. You're just there and you feel good when you

00:48:23get there and you take all your stuff and you don't care, you know, what happens to the weather.

00:48:29It's its own sub brand VFR became its own sub brand. It took all of that world supers glow and

00:48:36gear driven cams and single sided swing arm stuff. NACA docks on the, we know, we know that, that, uh,

00:48:45Honda was introducing hot stuff that would, would compete with the sort of interceptor role, namely,

00:48:52uh, the, the 900 RR and, uh, its subsequent, um, descendants, which are in line fours.

00:49:06And, uh, these

00:49:13steps forward leave a classic design behind. So a new role has to be found for it. And that was

00:49:24the natural one of a kind of sport touring, uh, identity. And that's what it carried into the

00:49:32new century. And frankly, that's what it's mainly remembered for. But I also remember

00:49:40those hot days in the summer of, of 1983, when people were saying,

00:49:45where can I get an interceptor? I got to have one because for reasons unknown, American riders suddenly

00:49:55appreciated handling. Before that, they just ripped through the magazine top speed quarter mile time.

00:50:03And that's the extent of a lot of people's knowledge about motorcycle in quotes, progress.

00:50:11But I think, I think what,

00:50:14you know, I, my observation is

00:50:18Kawasaki

00:50:20H2s, uh, you just need one ride on a 75 Liberta 3CL before, especially before they tip the shocks

00:50:28forward. 75 is the one that I owned. And I rode that bike in the 90s, 2000s.

00:50:38And, um, yeah, it was, uh, it was terrifying.

00:50:41I mean, it was big, bulky, long, heavy steering. It handled okay. You know, the suspension was very

00:50:49stiff. It had S and W, the S and W shocks on the back that were rock hard. And that was, that

00:50:55goes back to the Alan Girdler, uh, quote of how you made suspension work in the seventies was by not

00:51:01letting it lock in it solid. And, uh, you know, that thing just wallowed all over the place. It would drag

00:51:10stuff. Um, it was fun to ride, but you know, you had this

00:51:16big, heavy front wheel, iron discs, and it just took everything took a lot of effort. And I think

00:51:23you had people who, who dealt with weave and wobble and, and worn out swing arm bushes on your,

00:51:30you know, they, they use plastic swing arm bushes and XS 650s and RDs and

00:51:34they know they, they're not tapered roller bearings in the headstock. And so you have all

00:51:39of these things adding up to engine performance has made great leaps. Handling is not there.

00:51:47And people have, people are, they've experienced that they've ridden enough and said like, yeah,

00:51:51wow, this thing, sure. It does an 11, two in the quarter, but turn one, watch out.

00:51:57Yeah. Well, when, when, uh, one of the writers that I worked with, Nick Rikiki made the transition

00:52:05from twins to the TZ 750, he came in from practice and he said, ah, I don't know how those guys are

00:52:13doing this. He said, I'm using all my strength to change direction, hauling on the bars. Well,

00:52:22it didn't surprise me years later when I learned that Ben Spees had bent the bars on some of his

00:52:28bikes because that's the lore with Freddie to Freddie on one of the seven fifties or that. Yeah.

00:52:34One of the seven fifties, you know, tubular sit up bikes that he was racing in the eighties.

00:52:39He, he bent the bars, 82, 81, something like that. Yep. So, uh, that business with a heavy front wheel,

00:52:47one of the bikes that my middle son, uh, bought on his way to the VFR was a, a, um, what was it,

00:52:56a CB 900 F and the front wheel on that is so heavy. And then you, he happened to have a front wheel from,

00:53:07uh, from a Kawasaki, uh, 600 super sport bike, just such a difference. And even people,

00:53:17people that remember those old heavy and frankly, terrible motorcycles of the deep past are impressed

00:53:26when they ride something that's easier to operate. And I think that the interceptor showed people that

00:53:35it was possible for the motorcycle to obey and to obey promptly and non-violently.

00:53:42Because what, what was happening at that time, Honda may have been trying to fight off Yamaha's challenge

00:53:51as part of the impetus for the VFRs. But at the same time, interceptor in 1983 was the first big gun

00:54:04of the re-engineered sport bikes. Those big, heavy sit-up 1000s were terrible motorcycles for racing.

00:54:13And that's why they had to be so extensively re-engineered. Forks replaced, swing arm replaced,

00:54:21brakes replaced, everything different. Yeah. Well, I mean, you think of, I think of Suzuki in 1984.

00:54:30Okay. You go to a Suzuki dealership, you go to a Suzuki dealership in 1984 and you had GS 1150 ES,

00:54:40huge, more displacement, big air cool inline four, giant fairing with the big round headlight,

00:54:47looked like bull door 1979, you know, big and like a big endurance racer. And then you had an FWS 1000 or

00:54:54the, you know, the, you know, the VF 1000 are sort of in the same period that looked like the future.

00:54:59And the Suzuki was clearly the past and Suzuki already knew that because what did we get in 85,

00:55:0585, 86, we got the GSXR 750. And, uh, that was, you know, that was the return salvo to a interceptor

00:55:13and then FZ 750, um, which was sort of Yamaha's, I don't know, wake, I don't know. I wouldn't call

00:55:22it waking up, but it was certainly where we weren't thinking about shaft drive triples and stuff. We,

00:55:30we just don't, we dove right into how are we going to win? It's like what BMW did when they decided to

00:55:37build a super bike. They said, well, we need, we got to do everything exactly how, like, we're not

00:55:44going to reinvent the wheel. That was what was so great about the BMW super bike was that they didn't

00:55:50reinvent the wheel. They didn't put their traditional thumb turn signals on. They didn't do anything

00:55:56alternative with the front end. They just like, Hey, show a, Hey, Ohlins. Hey, whoever. Yeah. Let's

00:56:02make the fork tubes really big and give it a good fork with good damping. And that's what they did.

00:56:07And then they said, well, you know, at the time that they were designing it, all the Japanese were

00:56:12like 150 horsepower, 155 horsepower, 160 horsepower, which is sort of where all the Japanese hit the

00:56:21brakes. They haven't, they haven't come out with a street production leader class bike. That's 180,

00:56:29190, 200 and BMW just came out of the gate. And from, from intake to exhaust, they just looked at

00:56:37how do we do this? They came out and they sort of, I mean, Ducati certainly they're

00:56:42building those exotics, but, uh, anyway, just to be able to say like, we're going to build a super

00:56:47bike. And that's what period, that historic period. Um, I think of being in cycle world's rented little

00:56:57room at the big, uh, show in Europe. And, uh, David Edwards, who was in your chair at that time,

00:57:06um, editor in chief. Um, and he looked around at all of us and he said, what are we going to call this?

00:57:14And nobody was saying anything. So I thought, how about Europe takes the lead?

00:57:23Because that's what was happening. The Europeans weren't scared as the Japanese were by

00:57:30the liability implications of electronic rider aids.

00:57:34They pioneered stuff and they called it what it was while the Japanese were still,

00:57:42hmm, maybe need special language for this. Uh, and I had one manufacturer say

00:57:53it's not traction control, but it's all about maintaining traction.

00:57:56Yeah. Very good. Very good. Outstanding. Got it. Okay. Yeah. It was a, it was a strange,

00:58:06it was a strange time. And also, you know, they didn't have, uh, I mean, if you look at somebody

00:58:13like Honda, how many millions of square feet of motorcycle production factory do they maintain

00:58:17around the world and the, what volumes are they dealing with? And so if you're a European manufacturer,

00:58:25your ability to say like, oh, we can, we can make a good margin on 5,000 of these units or 3,000,

00:58:32what's viable? Uh, they, they could make those smaller decisions. I mean, I think

00:58:39what BMW is sort of 220,000, I think units annually. So, you know, we've seen a

00:58:47and they're completely unembarrassed to offer, uh, a scooter for, uh, $13,000 and maybe somebody bought

00:58:57them too. I don't know. I'd be curious, but of course that is a different market. Yeah.

00:59:05Europe is no longer riding to work on a Solex or a Cridler. Um, people get to work somehow,

00:59:14but not that way. So it's a, a premium market and the Europeans have gone after it in the U S

00:59:23in a very methodical way. Who has the money? Who's willing to spend it on this? Let's get them.

00:59:31Uh, and, uh, that's, I won't say that's finished, but it is weakened in the U S I remember a fellow

00:59:49came into our dealership and this would be like 1970. And he said, well, I just lost my job. So I'm

00:59:59going to buy a bike because he had every confidence. It wasn't going to be, uh,

01:00:08the terrible 2008 things go down, they come back confidence in America. And it was good to see,

01:00:16we were glad to sell him a motorcycle, even if he didn't have a job because he soon would have.

01:00:22So, uh, there's been a shift in the market, uh, toward premium products, uh, in the Western nations.

01:00:35Meanwhile, the big gigantic market is in Asia and Southeast Asia. And that's where the action is.

01:00:42Oh yeah. Brazil and India. Yeah. You know, much larger middle-class in India than 20 years ago.

01:00:52And Royal Enfield is there with an affordable line of motorcycles.

01:00:58But, uh, I guess, uh, you know, the, one of the sad notes that we'll, we'll finish this podcast with was

01:01:04I have it on good authority that there was a five cylinder, a V five street bike that was in the

01:01:14works and far along that was ultimately killed because our appetite for that kind of, we did

01:01:20finally get the RC two 13 V the V four version, which was, was very cool. And it was very haunted in

01:01:26the sense that, oh, by the way, it's a hundred horsepower unless, unless you get these special

01:01:34parts, which you can't get in the States cause it's not legal and we can't. And then you, you know,

01:01:41that was a very, very Honda way of going about it. Um, that was 2015, something like that.

01:01:48I went to see that thing. It was very beautiful. It was wonderfully finished.

01:01:53Oh, exquisite. Yeah. And it had it all, you know, it had, it had all the potential, but they were,

01:01:59they're very compliant. Let's say they, they take all of the, all of the rules very seriously. You

01:02:06know, the, the sound limits, I mean, a, a BMW, uh, S 1000 RR, when those first came out, they were loud.

01:02:16We were doing super bike testing and the Yamaha R one would go by and it'd go whoosh.

01:02:21Yeah. And then the BMW go by and go, and it's like, huh? And they just, you know, BMW was like,

01:02:28yeah, we'll get right up on the, get right up on the limit. And, um, there were margins, you know,

01:02:35they were maintaining margins and then the life of the motorcycle, how, you know, how loud does it get

01:02:39over time and what's the warranty? And they were real serious about it where, where the fender is

01:02:45relative to the rear wheel, the width of the turn signals, everything was pitch perfect. And,

01:02:52uh, a lot of European manufacturers were a little more cowboy about that stuff,

01:02:56although their volumes have gone up. So they'll so have the penalties.

01:03:00Yeah. Well, thanks for listening folks. Uh, oh, we, oh, Kevin says something. He's ready.

01:03:07Yeah. No, I was making a face. Um, thanks for listening folks. Um, uh, we'll thank Octane

01:03:16lending for being our sponsor. Click the, uh, link in description, go check out a new bike,

01:03:21um, and, uh, see what you qualify for. It's quick and easy and, um, yeah, it helps support us. So,

01:03:28uh, please check it out. Uh, we will catch you next time. Thanks so much.

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