What do you get for your money?
A good, honest, basic motorcycle. Rather than dumbing down a sportsbike, Honda started with a blank sheet of paper. That allowed a relatively long-stroke engine layout, designed from the start to be easy to use and mildly tuned – it has soft cams and a compression ratio of just 11.4:1. Unlike re-purposed sportsbike engines, this is designed to be on show, so has fewer external hose and cable routes, to keep things looking tidy.
Peak power is down on the older CBR600F and Hornet but that was deliberate too, keeping it under the limit for possible restriction for A2 licences. The new engine sits in a simple steel frame (painted black) with aluminium swingarm and directly-actuated monoshock. At the front are simple 41mm conventional forks and basic two-piston sliding-caliper brakes and solid-mount wavy discs. Cleverly, the discs are CNC machined to save material — the rear discs are cut from the bits left over from making the front ones. There’s a bit of bling with the gold alloy wheels (with supersport 600-sized tyres giving plenty of choice of rubber) but otherwise the main focus for frippery is the surprisingly fully featured LCD dash. Separate tacho and speed displays offer a range of info including fuel gauge, two separate trip meters (one of which can be set to autoreset after filling but it’s not very reliable), clock, fuel countdown, fuel consumption readouts and ABS (where fitted) and engine management status light. Curiously (and annoyingly) there’s no gear indicator.