Air-cooled cool

If you want that air-cooled Honda but don’t want to pay £50K, what do you have to do? Scott Redmond and Bertie Simmonds have some advice.

Idon’t do football, but I need to use an analogy, so here goes. I am going to kick off this NOBA with a comparison. The prices of these old motorcycles we fondly remember and yearn for are rising and like it or loathe it, it is a fact. But what fuels the steep prices? Sure there’s supply and demand but that isn’t enough to create leaps in asking prices. Once a model breaks a new ceiling in the marketplace it creates the benchmark and the Honda CB750 is one model that’s got lots of notches on its desktop. Here comes the analogy: Trevor Francis broke the million quid barrier on the transfer market in 1978. I have zero idea how I even know this, but that’s how bike prices operate. If a bike gets sold for a big ticket price it pulls up the rest of the market. So, having heard recently of a 1969 CB750K0 that changed hands for £55,000 in the UK, it has, by default, increased the value of every other K0 left out there. I have no real personal yearning for the machine many call the first real ‘superbike’, not because I am a pleb and don’t appreciate its place in motorcycling’s hall of fame, it’s because, like Trevor Francis might have been worth a million bucks, I always reckoned Trevor Brooking was better value for money. There’s such an assortment of 750 Hondas to choose from, you might think looking for my Brooking might be difficult, but I can assure you it isn’t. So, sit down with me in the dugout and I’ll explain. Firstly, let’s look at the evidence... Those early K models are quite similar, pretty much the same meat and potato, just different veg and gravy through the years. The