2014 Honda Grom fast enough to turn back time
I am 12 years old. Three years of successful wheedling, pleading and just generally being a major pain the youknow-what has seen my lovely, wonderful loving parents park a minibike under the Christmas tree. Not just any minibike, either, like the balloon-tired, Briggs & Stratton-powered piece of malarkey that my friend Ned McGee’s parents foisted on him, but a bright lime-gold, yes-ithas-a-transmission Honda. And not just any Honda, but a shiny new CT70, which, if you’re of a certain age, will recognize as the entry-level ride of our generation.
The next five years were a blur of two-wheeled adventure. Daylong sojourns through Northern Quebec (gas tanks strategically located along our route so we could make ith ome), learning to slide the rear wheel (not easy when said rear wheel has but five horsepower with which to break traction) and trying, for the first time, to jump a motorcycle (without the benefit as anything recognizable today as suspension). That CT was everything that was good about motorcycling and, truth be told, everything good (incredibly reliable, impressively frugal and virtually indestructible) about Honda. Nothing I’ve ridden since — mega-motored superbikes, couch-comfy tourers or leaping motocrossers — has supplanted my love of that old Trail 70.
This is why, as far as I am concerned, the most exciting motorcycle launched this year — hell, the most exciting motorcycle launched in the past 10 years — is Honda’s Grom. As modernized as this MSX 125 may be (with its fuel injection and newfangled disc brakes), underneath its modern veneer beats the heart of my trusty old CT. It’s almost exactly the same size, the tires as diminutive as the original, the engine is one of Honda’s ultra ubiquitous horizontally splayed singles and the transmission has but four gears.
What’s more important is that, in spirit, the new Grom is exactly the same bike. Riding this little Honda for a few days brought back floods of memories of all those youthful adventures because as slow, gutless and no-frills as the Grom is, there is nothing on wheels more adept at jumping curbs, snaking through traffic and just generally flouting the law.
I am pretty sure I committed a ticketable traffic offence every 100 feet I rode the little Honda. Expect no apologies, John Law, for whatever poor example I might have been setting for the young and impressionable is more than offset by what I assume is a far more important image — that overworked, mondo-stressed, normally contained 55-year-olds can dance (OK, ride) like nobody’s watching when the spirit, or a Honda Grom, moves them.
If you really need technical details to sell yourself on the Grom, the 124.9-cc four-stroke pumps out about 10 horsepower through that four-speed transmission. Flat out, following an old Econoline van, feet hooked over the rear tail lights like Rollie Free at Bonneville, it will do 119 kilometres an hour. Without a wind block and sitting bolt upright, you might see 100 km/h, but only if the road is perfectly flat.
Best of all — and this was a point I stressed to my parents so many, many moons ago — the little Grom is dirt cheap, Honda Canada’s $3,199 asking price a pittance for the smiles that the Grom is virtually guaranteed to return.
If the people who are lining up — and sales here and in the U.S. are said to be very brisk — have half as much fun as I did way back when, the Grom will be best thing to happen to motorcycling since Harley met Davidson.
I defy anyone to take a scoot on the little CT, er, Grom and not be instantly transformed into a grinning idiot. The Grom’s little engine may boast only 125-cc, but it is fast enough to turn back time.