RIDING THE NEO CAF‘ WAVE
The ‘Neo-sports Café’ label that Honda attach to their revamped fourcylinder nakeds is clearly preposterous, but a ride from Barcelona to Biarritz on the CB650R impresses Bike’s
Bike’s founding editor Mark Williams explains why Honda’s CB650R is so good.
ASPANKING NEW CB1000R is what I’ve been slated to ride when Honda’s little cavalcade sets off from a glitzy hotel on the outskirts of Barcelona. The plan: to ride through the Pyrenees and across the French border to Biarritz and the Wheels ‘n’ Waves festival (page 22). On the A2 motorway running north-east of the city and up to the foothills it seems like a good tool for the job. It’s smooth, and at the hand of programmable traction control its acceleration is effortless
and stonkingly impressive. And it handles with great surety and yet a high degree of spraunce. But up in the mountains, when the N260 becomes endlessly twisty, and often tortuously so, I soon become aware that this is a bike that needs quite a lot of effort to pilot predictably.
After a night spent in Huesca, northeastern Spain, I step onto its admittedly only marginally smaller and lighter sibling and instantly appreciate what I’ve been missing. For anyone who’s been asleep for the past four decades, the sports middleweight class has been dominated by DOHC four cylinder bikes that revved like buggery and handled whip-quick, most notably from Kawasaki and Honda. But increasingly they required racerlike skills to wring the optimum, never mind maximum, performance from. The CB650R is not like that.
For starters although Honda claim a whacking 93bhp at an equally heady 12,000rpm the torque delivery begins even below 3000rpm and, thanks to brilliant fuel-mapping, heads swiftly and unflinchingly towards the 8500 mark at which point Honda say it’s developing 47 lb.ft.
Unlike the CB1000R’S, traction control is a straightforward on/off affair. Which means – especially on twisty mountain switchbackery like we have here – the CB650R is an easy bike to ride fast. The same might be said of the faired CBR650R (Bike, August 2019). But that’s a bike that, despite having the same chassis and running gear, requires a little more testicular commitment. Why? Elementary m’dear Watson, it’s simply down to riding position. Though certainly not a sit-upand-beg arrangement
– the foot-peg hangers and levers are the same on both bikes – the ’bars on this bike are higher, slightly straighter and tapered. And although the seats are the same – and pretty damn comfy even on a long ride, BTW
– the riding position is more relaxed.
And so therefore is riding it fast, which the revtastic engine obviously encourages you to do. I hadn’t ridden such a rev-hungry machine since a friend’s highly tuned RD500 LC a few years ago which ‘only’ redlined at eleven grand. But since this Honda engine pulls, really pulls, from around 3000rpm and carries on delivering the groceries until you genuinely run out of sadistic intent for its clearly unburstable engine, you can spurt out of corners at 8000rpm. Then change up at 10,000. Conversely, when dawdling in slow-moving traffic, which we are through the small towns that pepper the Pyraneean landscape, the engine willingly responds to sudden bursts of in-gear snapping from what is, remember, a mechanical rather than a computer-driven throttle.
‘Sports middleweights… increasingly required racer-like skills to wring the optimum, never mind maximum, performance from. The CB650R is not like that’
As for stuffing it into corners from those self-same high revs. Well, engine braking plays its part here and the excellent Nissin brakes, with their four-pot calipers on the front 310mm discs, also haul things down to a manageable pace in a trice. However, and bear in mind this is still a 4-stroke albeit a high-flying one, there are times when the relationship between the silky-smooth but not always positive gearchange and the superlight slipper clutch mean a fluffed descent through the cogs. The result: you can come out of a bend without sufficient grunt to hand.
What you don’t get, thanks to the excellent frame geometry and the Showa suspension, is much of a wobble during such discomfiture. Unlike the CB1000R the 41mm USD front fork is non-adjustable but in just about any circumstance that really matters the damping is both linear and progressive. Although identical to the CBR version the front package also seems to be a tad comfier, which again I put down to the riding position and thus weight distribution.
The only suspension adjustment provided is rear preload, but testbike set-up feels just right for my weight and the roads we encounter. It’s impossible to get the bike to hop about on some of the less smooth footpeg-scraping corners we are rattling around. On the crappy B-roads we endure in Britain that might not be the case, in which case easing off the spring pressure might be a benefit.
As mentioned last month the suspension is built down to a
price and this is true elsewhere such as the steel frame, straightforward electronics and more. But although over 20 pages of the owner’s manual must be pored over to master the comparatively simple dashboard display, neither it nor anything else about the bike feels or looks cheap. It is all very Honda and none the worse for it.
Much of the second day’s riding, some 220 miles, is done on wet, often very wet, roads both up in the mountains and on the lower, flatter A64 from Oloron-sainte-marie and onward. Here both the traction control and the non-switchable ABS provide such confidence that average speeds don’t seem much lower than the previous day’s. The well-regarded Metzeler Roadtecs obviously help here too, especially when the surface transmutes from dry to damp to wet, often in the space of a few dozen yards. Which is never helpful.
By the end of my time with Honda’s CB650R – which includes a couple of days tooling if not tootling around and beyond Biarritz, my fears that this particular naked might have an overly sporting focus prove to be thoroughly irrelevant. And although as sharp and sexy-looking as they look to me, I do think that Honda’s description of it and its bigger brother as ‘Neo-sports Café Racers’ is a bit far-fetched. That said it is certainly a bike you could zip down to Starbucks on, even if that Starbucks happened to be in Biarritz. And let’s not forget that you’re getting four cylinders and a helluva lot of bang for your £6999. That’s on the road and is an amount that usually keeps you in twin cylinder territory.
‘My fears that this particular naked might be too much of a knife-edge trackday special prove to be thoroughly irrelevant’