HONDA DREAM AND BENLY

THE QUIRKY AND FRIENDLY DREAM AND BENLY DIDN’T LOOK LIKE THE OUTRIDERS OF A REVOLUTION THAT WOULD OVERTURN THE WORLD OF MOTORCYCLING

THE QUIRKY PAIR THAT HELPED TO CHANGE MOTORCYCLING

The 250cc Honda Dream in blue and 150cc Honda Benly in red definitely have looks that instantly evoke their era — late ’50s, early ’60s — but they are even cooler now than they were then, when they were smart workaday transport. The deeply valanced guards, the solid blocks of colour, and the tank on the Dream that looks as if it is facing the wrong way give them a charm all their own. They look friendly and unthreatening, and a welcome change from angular black and macho modern motorcycles or weaponized sports bikes.

In my youth, I wasn’t charmed. The pressedsteel forks reminded me too forcibly of the pressed-tin toys that were easily mangled, and the ‘made in Japan’ tag hadn’t yet become a mark of quality. They didn’t look like real motorcycles.

Styled after NSU

Fortunately, owner Chris Stephens didn’t share my reservations; his second bike was a second-hand and well-used Honda Benly, so acquiring another one in recent years was high on his list of priorities.

The C72 Dream and the C92 Benly perfectly illustrate part of the trajectory that put Soichiro Honda in the first rank of architects of the modern world, alongside Henry Ford. The 1961 Dream and the 1964 Benly are among the last examples of Honda’s first big bikes. They were born in the ’50s, after Mr Honda’s fact-finding mission to Europe. He was impressed by the NSU Rennmax that won the 1954 Isle of Man TT, which helps explain the vaguely eastern European styling of these bikes.

Soichiro Honda returned to Japan to create the 250cc C70 Honda Dream in 1956, so named because he was fulfilling his own dream to build proper motorbikes … and to build them better than other bikes. And he did. He also opened up markets beyond the leather-clad diehards who had accepted that fixing bikes and permanently dirty fingernails were essential elements of motorcycling up to that point.

Having created new motorcycling worlds, Honda and a growing band of Japanese competitors then took their game to the next level, creating the dirt bike and sports bike revolutions that transformed our twowheeled landscape.

It’s all written here in these two motorcycles. Despite their almost quaint looks and the odd forks — much beefier than I thought up close but having the strange Earles-type cantilever arrangement — they ride very well.

A massively familiar experience

Both bikes offer a distinctly modern riding affair. You fire them up with a starter, the engine and exhaust sound proper, they are smooth, and you can punt them into corners with confidence. It’s a massively familiar experience. The only slightly odd thing is the vertical instead of horizontal slot for the indicator slider on the right-hand switch block: up for right and down for left.

The drive chains are hidden in chain cases, which prevent oil splash, avoid the snagging of ladies’ skirts, and no doubt protect the chains from the dust and dirt of most Asian roads of that era. Interestingly, the drive chain swapped sides from the right on the Dream to the left on the Benly, which is the standard arrangement on the 30 or so other bikes we could see at the time.

You can imagine any modern young man in Tokyo, Delhi, Frankfurt, or Los Angeles zipping happily about town on these bikes. That was the case in Rotorua, where Chris bought his first Benly and hit the gravel roads of Coromandel, camping with his mates who had their own cheap-and-cheerful bikes.

“It never put a foot wrong,” he remembers. The engines are simply amazing. Chris’s 150cc Benly produced 12kw — better than 75kw a litre, and still a mark of serious performance 50plus years later — and, of course, the crank cases were split horizontally. That meant that they weren’t set up to drip oil — such a slaphead, obvious improvement over traditional bikes. Combine that with the modern manufacturing processes that the Japanese invented, which allowed them to build engines to much finer tolerances, and suddenly you had clean and reliable power, and happy customers. It also meant that bikes could rev to an outrageous 10,000rpm. Truly the modern era had arrived.

Chris bought these bikes from a restorer, who picked them up in rough condition at an auction following the demise of a Wellington motorcycle dealer in 2003. The dealer had collected or kept a lot of old trade-in bikes. The auction attracted buyers from across the country, who were starting to appreciate Japanese classics.

Chris didn-’t buy then. He says that the bidding was quite frenzied — the bikes went for “hundreds”. But the urge to buy another Benly didn’t go away, and, as everyone suspected, prices have continued to rise, so these beautifully restored examples are still a good investment, as well as good clean fun.

If that’s not charming enough, who can resist the helpful riding instructions (see right) that Honda provides in the Benly’s owner’s manual?