Honda’s ‘Super Blade’ revealed! OFFICIAL drawings from Honda!
Here’s the secret Honda drawing for the V4 ‘SuperBlade’ that we’ve been telling you was on the way for nearly 10 months now.
This patent from Honda has just landed on our desk and it tallies with reports we started bringing you back at the start of last July. Here’s the inside rub on what we’ve learnt from it (we are NOT saying that all this is going on the final bike, but this IS what the patent is showing right now, so this IS what Honda has on its design plate as we sit here today).
Here’s the details of the listing from Honda which has now gone out into the big world. Now, this is a patent design for the air intakes (pics 2, 3 and 4) into a new airbox that sits snuggly between the V of the V4 motor. Because this patent is for this particular bit of the bike, it has to be height and bodywork-accurate in the drawing so as to be clear that this is EXACTLY where these parts sit in relation to the vehicle they’re for.
So the motorcycle in this drawing really IS the bike that this new intake and airbox are designed for. This is not a way of hiding a new motor or airbox for – say – a VFR1200 motor or something similar that we don’t yet know about. These drawings are for the air intakes on this bike. Yep.
And there are real differences between this bike and the RC213V-S £180,000 road-legal MotoGP bike, despite this drawing looking virtually identical to that piece of factory exotica at first glance.
Let’s go through them starting at the front of the bike. For comparison purposes we’ve printed the sideon image of the new bike above (picture 1) with the current RC213V-S alongside that.
Here’s our list of things to look at between both of those images so that you can compare them yourself.
1: The front mudguard:
On the RC213V-S the mudguard is a swooping piece of track-crafted windcheating art. On the drawing it’s a different, more road-usual mudguard.
2: The headlight:
On the RC213V-S the headlight is a narrow split slit of a set-up that is barely visible from the side view, on the drawing it’s a much larger, more conventional Fireblade set-up that is clearly aimed at being useful at night.
3: The intake itself:
Because this is what the whole design patent surrounds, this needs to be exactly accurate in relation to where it sits in the bodywork, the height from the ground and the relation of its position in comparison to the frame and wheelbase. There’s no intakes like this on the RC213V-S, this – like the airbox – is all new.
4: The seat:
Look at the difference between the road-going ‘Super Blade’ RVF in the drawings and the actual piece of foam on the RC213V-S. We’re not saying that the new bike will be comfy or sumptuous to sit on… but it’s got more of a real-world seat than it’s megaexpensive track-inspired sibling.
5: Exhaust on the wrong side:
In the drawing (which has to be bodywork accurate, like we said) the lower exhaust exits on the left-hand side of the bike instead of on the right hand side of the bike as is the case with the RC213V-S.
The new position for the exhaust is indicated by the fact that it’s drawn with a dotted line rather than a solid line as would be the case if it was on the right hand side of the bike.
It might be a small pipe like on the MotoGP machine but for whatever reason Honda has this pipe on the left rather than the right (actually, a lot of racey Hondas have historically had their exhaust exiting on the left so this might – might – have something to do with it, to be honest with you we’re just guessing at this bit though). The pipe exiting under the seat looks the same as on the RC213V-S though.
6: The fairing in pieces:
On the RC213V-S the main bulk of the side fairing is one glorious sweeping bit of lovely bodywork but on this drawing which – it’s worth saying again – has to be bodywork accurate in relation to the air-intake information it’s patenting, the side fairing is now in two pieces and the bellypan sweeps up the side of the motor further to hide the metal away.
Okay, so that’s what we can see this early on in studying the drawing compared to the mega-priced RC213V-S and we’re sure that you can probably find more differences (and if you do, please let us know below). There will no doubt be people saying that this is a RC213V-S drawing changed slightly but that’s not how these things work.
If Honda was just tweaking a design for the current RC213V-S then the drawing wouldn’t feature changes to exhaust position, intake position, bodywork composition, mudguard or headlight. A drawing that didn’t mean much in terms of a new bike would be a repeat of the bike that we’ve already seen with changes made as needed for the new bit of design around an air intake. Here we see a raft of differences between this road-going motorcycle and the RC213V-S.
So, last July we told you that Honda was building not one but TWO versions of the future Fireblade. One that was staying at the lower-end of the price and spec range and the other which was going much bigger to take on the likes of Yamaha’s R1-M and Kawasaki’s ZX-10R, we said then that the new ‘Super Blade’ was likely to be more WSB-spec on the road and styling wise it could even get the RVF name like iconic race-bike-for-theroad machines that we’ve seen before. And here’s the proof of all of that. It’s likely that this bike will change more before it finally appears in a year’s time to buy, but for now the ‘Super Blade’ has appeared in this interestingly-finished guise.
We’ve put the rest of the bits of this design on this page also.