REVEALED: Honda’s grand plans for a new screaming sports 600!
Secret NEW CBR600 patents are filed by the factory (and a French Honda boss says that the 600 ISN’T dead!)
These are the secret Honda design drawings that prove that a CBR600 is in the works.
The designs concentrate on the air intake route through the nose of the middleweight and the fairing brackets that support it. The intake routes the air flow directly into a frame front opening.
A few things to point out with the side-on design (left): 1: The motor in the bike. We’ve outlined the engine in the CBR600 with a red circle (1) and coloured in the bike’s side profile of the engine, too. It’s an inline motor, NOT a V4 (to show you the difference we’ve put the upcoming V4 patent’s side-on design below, if you look at the outline of the engine in this patent you’ll see that it’s clearly a V4 and very different to the motor shown in the 600).
2: The CBR600 in these designs (above) has a pillion seat (red circle 2) and pillion pegs (red circle 4). Nothing of which has appeared in any designs for the V4, which has been designed purely as a singleseat sportbike with active aero in the seat unit’s ‘wing’. Take a look at the V4’s side-on design to compare the differences in the entire back end.
3: The underseat exhaust (red circle 3 – above) is routed with the pipe snaking around the underside of the engine and up to the silencer. The V4’s exhaust routes the rear two pipes from the motor down and behind the bracketing for the right footrest before linking up with the others to join the low-slung right-side silencer.
So, these drawings are now all filed as one design for one bike – the CBR600 – and with this the comments made by the public relations director at Honda France, Bruno Chemin (pictured left) make more sense about an overall direction to what’s coming from Honda. Chemin made these comments last October and we brought you them first once again on MoreBikes.co.uk. Last year Chemin said: “If you ask me if this is the end after nearly 30 years of the CBR600 then I would say that simply, we cannot be so categorical. The development is suspended and there are currently no plans for a future CBR600. But nothing forbids us to return to class in a few years, if the market has changed.”
At the tail end of last year Yamaha launched its updated R6 – a bike that captured a lot of headlines around the world and looks to be capable of delivering something that uses the latest MotoGP tech for the road at an affordable price. Perhaps this was the final move to edge Honda into rebirthing the CBR6 with these updated designs.