Winged Quarter-litre Twin

THE ALL-NEW CBR 250RR, BASED ON THE LIGHTWEIGHT SUPERSPORT Concept that Honda had shown at the Tokyo Motor Show last November, has been revealed. A video from Honda Two-wheelers Indonesia released earlier confirmed the ‘RR’ model and asked us to ‘expect the unexpected’. That time has come. The cat is out of the bag.

The new CBR 250RR looks every bit as sharp and lithe as the Concept suggested it would. It packs goodies and detailing not even seen on the CBR 1000RR Fireblade. The 250RR gets an upside-down (USD) front fork, petal discs with ABS, and a Euro 4-compliant double-barrel exhaust. The instrumentation is all digital, too, and, going by the display, it’s certainly a high-revving beast.

Underneath that DRL-laden fairing is a liquid-cooled, DOHC, eightvalve parallel twin with as yet undisclosed output figures. The RR will be significantly more powerful than the CBR 250R single-cylinder model. It is aimed, no doubt, at the Yamaha YZF-R25, Kawasaki Ninja 250R, KTM RC 250 as well as the upcoming Suzuki GSX-R 250. Dare we say, a slightly higher capacity model may also be expected to take on the current 300+cc crop.

Honda have said that they currently have no plan to bring the CBR 250RR to India, citing reasons of cost. However, the only reason we’d like to hear is that the larger version would be coming in to take on the YZF-R3, Ninja 300 and RC 390. Watch this space.