1969 Honda CB750
An original, four-pipe Honda CB750K makes a fine bike to ride to a summer’s evening bike meet in 2019, and with that comfy looking dual seat you might be able to persuade your significant other to snuggle up behind you for the ride. In candy colours, blue, gold or red, with contrasting tank stripe, and four separate chrome exhausts, they look fantastic. 50 years after the CB750 was launched the world’s gone retro crazy, but the Honda’s carburettors are real, the analogue instruments aren’t digital dummies and there’s no concealed radiator. This is the genuine article, comfortable with its place in the world because it is the first modern motorcycle. Before the CB750 there was no mass produced multi, no across the frame four, no disc brakes and motorcycle starting rituals involved a big kick.
The Honda arrived like a UFO and trad bikers were wary. They were right to be nervous because the CB750 made oily fingered greebos obsolete too. You no longer had to be a mechanic to enjoy speed on two wheels, because you no longer had to rebuild your own bike after visiting three figure speeds. Cane the CB750. Then cane it some more, and then take it back to the dealer for its scheduled service. It didn’t just change motorcycle engineering, it turned biking into a leisure activity to be enjoyed by people without broken fingernails.
It made its UK debut at the Brighton motorcycle show in April 1969, but its world premier was at the Tokyo show the previous October. In the UK it cost £650, £35 more than Triumph’s three-cylinder 750 Trident, which had come to market in ’68.
The two bikes had similar performance, in fact the Brit might have been marginally faster and possibly (on original tyres and shocks) better handling. But it couldn’t compete with the Honda on spec – four-cylinders, single overhead
camshaft, five-speed gearbox, electric starter and disc front brake. Though the Brits cobbled the latter three onto their bikes in the coming years, before succumbing to the inevitable.
The Triumph Trident was a lash-up; they sound glorious and they’re a more engaging ride than a CB750, but look at the crankcases, vertically split and with three separate major castings machined by men in brown coats on worn out WW2 era tools, and realise that they are closer to Isambard Kingdom Brunel than to 21st century production engineering. This was a pivotal moment in the evolution of the motorcycle, the last vintage bike versus the first modern machine. Half a century later the winner still looks contemporary. In fact, the sohc CB750 had a relatively short production life. After yearly updates of the four-pipe K model, and more sporting F1 (1975) and F2 (1977) derivatives, Honda introduced an all-new dohc CB750 with dry sump lubrication in 1979. By then Kawasaki and Suzuki also made bigger, more powerful and better equipped machines based on the CB750’S across the frame four-cylinder template. A first series CB, a ‘low numbers’ bike with sand cast cases, will cost big money. £25,000 plus reckons marque specialist John Wyatt. ‘But be careful, there’s some rubbish out there.’ Later bikes are cheaper, and better. If you’re doing a thousand miles a year, and keep it minty you shouldn’t lose money. But be sure you really want one. It might have set the template for the modern motorcycle, but in 50 years there’s been a lot of refinement. Ride a CB750 after a modern bike and it’ll feel slow, unrefined, ill-handling and underbraked. But it’ll look great at that summer’s evening bike meet.