25 years of greatness
More than 25 years ago Honda’s CBR900RR FireBlade was launched and it’s still going strong. And the life of this seminal sportsbike is to be celebrated in a new bookazine. MCM looks at how it all began.
It’s fair to say that Tadao Baba changed bike design for the better.
Back in the late 1980s sports bikes were big and unwieldy: think Suzuki’s GSX-R1100, Kawasaki’s ZX-10 and Honda’s CBR1000F. “Bikes at the time in the 1980s were very fast. WHOOSSH,” Baba mimed with a smile on his face, making his hand shoot upwards, like a rocket. “But I felt they never turned like a race bike, there was no ‘flick-flack,’” he again held his hand up to show what he meant, this time mimicking a bike flicking through a chicane as he made his hand move from the vertical to the left then quickly back upright and swiftly down to the right. “You see, I wanted a bike that would be good into the corners, which produced good power and had good brakes. A sport bike should be controlled freely as to the rider’s wish. In this aspect, all those big monsters were not good enough to be called a sport bike. Yes, they were fast, but to my mind they were quite dull. The CBR900RR made its debut in 1992, but it took us more than three years to reach that point.”
The precursor to what would become the FireBlade project (capital B until the 2004 model) was headed up for the first six months by HRC’s Yoichi Oguma, but soon Baba-san was appointed project leader and knew what he wanted a sportsbike to do. How it should feel and how it should react to a rider’s input. Unusually then, the FireBlade was to be the fruits of an engineer’s vision, not that of a mere marketing man.
Three years of testing (including a mock-up of a CBR750RR version) finally led to the CBR900RR-N which took the motorcycle world by storm, when launched in the spring of 1992. But what was the ethos behind it? “We knew we must go back and start again with sports bikes,” explained Baba-san. “We wanted to give riders something over which they had ‘total control.’”
Total control: these two words would come back again and again as what became the Honda FireBlade was developed over the next quarter of a century. The other phrase championed by Baba and the team was ‘mass centralisation’ where you made things as light as you could and – if it could be done – you put the heaviest things close to the centre of the motorcycle’s mass.
The FireBlade – so called as a translation of the Japanese word for ‘lightning’ – didn’t push the technological boundaries (being a relatively proven 16-valve, liquidcooled inline four cylinder) but it was a positively anorexic 185kg. And while it didn’t challenge the mighty GSX-R1100 for outright power, that motor was still pumping out litreclass grunt (110-120bhp depending on dyno) and was put into a chassis with the mass of a 600cc machine equipped with the geometry of a 250cc two-stroke sports bike. For the time, the spec-sheet alone made the bike a scary proposition.
At launch journalists loved it – but many felt the twitchy 16in front wheel meant that the bike needed a steering damper. “No damper – too heavy!” Baba-san would say. And the 16in front was an answer to the problem of weight: Baba and his team wanted as light a front wheel as possible with quick turn-in, so developed a 16in wheel equipped with a tyre which had the dimensions of a 17-incher. They even went against fashion by using ‘right-way-up’ forks which were made to almost look like inverted forks as upside-downers were just too heavy to use…
And so the legend began. The Honda CBR900RR FireBlade was launched in the UK in the spring of 1992 costing just £7390. It blew away the opposition and became the benchmark sportsbike for years to come.
One man synonymous with the FireBlade story through to the present day is Dave Hancock. Dave worked at Honda UK and was one of the original development riders. He has worked on all the models through to the current 2017/18 version. He said: “It really was a step forward for sportsbike design – my favourite was the first model in black, I owned one. It really was amazing to get the feedback on that first model and see what people thought. I do think that the original CBR900RR FireBlade was just too flighty for many riders.”
The FireBlade was the king of the litre-class sportsbikes until 1998 when Yamaha’s 150bhp YZF-R1 turned the class on its head once more, meanwhile the CBR900RR had gone the other way. By listening to owners and customers Honda had – in the meantime – improved the Blade, but it had softened things a little. For the 1994/95 RR-R/S version, in had come improved suspension and gearchange along with new aesthetics which changed the twin-headlight stare of the original Blade into a lupine-like ‘Foxeye’ look, with a multireflector headlight arrangement.
Further updates for the RR-T/V or 1996/97 gave the Blade increased capacity (now up to 918.5cc) along with still more suspension improvements and more relaxed ergonomics. With 1998/99’s RR-W/X, in came a new look once more, with minor tweaks, but even with an extra two bhp to a claimed 128 it was way behind the sharper R1…
The new millennium saw the launch of a fully-updated Blade, equipped with fuel-injection, a 929cc engine based on what went before, better brakes and (at last) upside-down front forks. The bike was better – although the aesthetics were often questioned – but the R1 still had the beating of it, even if tests from the time praised the 929’s manners and ease of use.
Baba-san was still heading up the project and his final version was a masterpiece. 2002/03’s 954cc FireBlade would be the last Blade to have a capital ‘B’ in the middle, as it was retired with Baba-san in his honour. The 954 saw a return to form for the FireBlade. The updated motor was stronger at low to midrpm, the buzzy feeling and snatchy fuel-injection was smoothed out and handling and braking refined still further. Best of all there was now a shark-like grace to the aesthetics.
Again, it was a case of giving the rider power and performance they could use. Many comparison tests of the time showed that the 954 would just edge the R1 and even the more powerful Suzuki GSX-R1000 K1 on overall usability on road and track. “There may have been bigger, faster bikes out there on the road,” says Baba-san, “but for us once more it was about giving the rider ‘Total Control.’”
Since Baba’s retirement the Blade legend has continued, through an RCV/MotoGP-inspired 1000cc model, launched in 2004, right up to today’s CBR1000RR Fireblade, complete with myriad electronic gizmos. On track, it’s even won British Superbike titles, a World Superbike championship and many TT races. But what does Baba think, looking back? “The Fireblade is like my son and it is so good to see so many of my children riding all around the world.”
Honda Fireblade: The Story so Far is available priced £6.99 from good newsagents or: https:// www.classicmagazines.co.uk/ product/5535