Can the CB750 possibly live up to the hype on modern roads? Oh yes
Honda’s CB750 hit the scene 50 years ago, allegedly setting the superbike template. Does that legend hold up today?
Context is everything. And 50 years is a long time. That’s how long Honda’s CB750 has been around. In 1969, when the new four-cylinder wonder-bike finally made it into UK showrooms, man had still to set foot on the moon. Now we’re talking about travelling to Mars and running tourist flights into space.
A lot has changed. And maybe it’s tempting these days to look at the CB750 as slightly old fashioned and – whisper it – dull even. Bikes have got faster, sharper and more sophisticated since the first pre-production CB750 caused more than a few jaws to drop at the 1968 Tokyo show. But that would be a mistake on two counts. To understand the first, you have to imagine yourself back in 1969. And to appreciate the second, you have to ride an early CB750 today – with an open mind.
That’s what I aim to do in a bright and blustery corner of coastal East Anglia. I’ve borrowed an early production 1969 ‘sandcast’ CB750 from David Silver, to help me understand what a leap forward Honda’s first fourcylinder machine was – and how it feels today. So, before swinging a leg over it, I’ve been thinking about how I would be feeling if this was 1969, not 2019. The year before the Honda came out, Norton had released the Commando – arguably the pinnacle of Brit parallel-twin development, but essentially an Atlas engine, a 20 year-old design at the time, in an admittedly very clever chassis. Triumph and BSA had launched their triples the same year. Like the Commando, they’re great and soulful bikes that performed admirably at Daytona early in 1969, but they were still based substantially on the ancient 500cc Triumph twin unit, with an extra cylinder grafted on. Honda approached the challenge of producing their first machine to overturn the dominance of the big-bore British iron a little differently. Theirs was the blank sheet of paper approach. And it worked.
Before the CB750, Honda’s biggest offering had been the CB450 ‘Black Bomber.’ It was a decent bike, with a fair turn of speed, but it was a middleweight – and no match for a well-fettled Bonneville or Dominator. It also followed the same basic engine architecture (apart from its dohc top end and torsion-bar valve springs) and chassis design as Honda’s smaller twins. But for the CB750, Honda threw the kitchen sink at development.
The design brief included sophisticated, modern electrics and instruments, effective brakes, total reliability
– and a target cruising speed of 85-100mph. It would have seemed the stuff of fantasy in most British factories’ boardrooms. But for Honda it wasn’t negotiable.
The heart of the CB750 was its engine. Horizontally-split crankcases carried a forged crank with five plain shell bearings and three sprockets in the centre of the shaft accommodating the twin primary-drive chains and chain drive to the overhead camshaft. Split conrods featured plain shell-bearing big-ends, the camshaft ran in shell bearings in the one-piece alloy cylinder head and high-pressure lubrication was provided by a twin-rotor, trochoidal pump. To help minimise the height of the engine, dry-sump lubrication was employed, with the oil tank situated behind the right-hand side panel.
The primary drive was connected to the clutch via a shock absorber, with drive transferred to the five-speed gearbox’s mainshaft by means of a drive plate attached to the clutch centre. The unit was a masterpiece of practical, effective design, moving mass-produced motorcycle engines to a new level.
The rest of the bike was no less sensational. A sturdy duplex frame may have been nothing too far out of the ordinary, but the disc front brake with a single-piston, swinging caliper certainly was.
So too was the starter motor, concealed under a tidy chrome cover behind the two left-hand cylinders. Indicators were standard, the colour scheme was a bang up-to-date choice of Candy Red or Candy Blue-green (with Candy Gold soon added) and the visual impact of this four-cylinder statement was further enhanced by the four exhaust pipes and silencers. The new Honda was a vision of the future.
Honda had chosen the huge American market as their prime target and the first production machines arrived there in May 1969. Testing of pre-production bikes had taken place over there and America Honda employee Bob Hansen is the man reputed to have convinced Honda to go with the four-cylinder layout, so it made sense. By June, 5000 bikes had been shipped to the USA and Canada – and were on sale at less than the price of a BSA or Triumph triple. Suddenly, the British manufacturers realised they were in trouble. Luckily for them, when the CB750 finally arrived in British dealers’ showrooms in January 1970, the UK price had risen to £680 from the £650 quoted when the pre-production bikes were first show at the Brighton show in April the previous year. That was appreciably more than the Brit triples – but nevertheless, all of the first (admittedly small) batch of fours were sold even before they reached the docks. Subsequent batches sold rapidly too – and all across Europe, CB750 fever grew and the bikes sold in their thousands. Honda had a hit on their hands and the world of motorcycling had changed forever.
In practical and technological terms, the new Honda was streets ahead of the competition. Back in 1969 – or 1970 if you were in the UK – getting your hands on a CB750 must have been a dream come true. It was one of the first affordable bikes to actually deliver on its manufacturer’s marketing claims. Hit the starter button – and the thing started. Turning left? Just flick that switch and the rest of the wheeled world knew where you were heading. Wind it up to 90mph – and sit there for hours, or until the road ran out, without bits of bike rattling off, fingers numbing and/or the rider’s teeth falling out. Even that front disc brake was nowhere near as bad as diehard Brit-bike Luddites would have you believe. And the Honda would keep on keeping on for tens of thousands of miles without major maintenance.
‘IT WAS A MASTERPIECE OF PRACTICAL DESIGN, MOVING MASS-PRODUCED MOTORCYCLE ENGINES TO A NEW LEVEL’
‘THE CB750’S PERFORMANCE, 50 YEARS ON, REMAINS AS MUCH AS MOST RIDERS WILL EVER NEED’
Maybe most importantly, though, the CB750 was the bike that delivered high-performance motorcycling to the masses. It was fast – Cycle World magazine wrung 123.24mph out of their test bike, British weekly Motor Cycle got 121mph out of theirs, while Motorcycle Mechanics managed 125mph. Period road testers praised the bike for its stability, comfort, lack of vibration and its ability to cover long distances astoundingly quickly. In time, the CB750 would be criticised for less than perfect handling, an average front brake and a gradual loss of edge in its performance throughout its production run. But in 1969/70 it was simply the best package on the road. A super bike. A superbike, in fact.
All that’s whirling round in my head as I get ready to hit the road on David’s ‘sandcast’. The engine and frame numbers confirm it’s the real deal – identifying it as one of the early production models from 1969. It’s not a restored garage queen, but a well looked-after Us-market model that carries the odd bump and scar from 50 years on the road. The Nippon Denso speedo shows just short of 14,500 miles on its odometer and, while I’ve no way of knowing for sure that’s a genuine figure, the overall condition of the bike hints that it might be. And that means it’s the ideal bike to give me a real sense of what a CB750 would have been like to ride 50 years ago.
A prod of the starter snaps the Honda into life instantly. That would have been an impressive trick in itself back in 1969. I let the bike warm up before rolling out into the countryside from David’s headquarters on the edge of Leiston, Suffolk. The engine is quiet and flexible, burbling happily along at 30mph in fourth gear. And when I open up the throttle as I leave the 30mph limit behind, it picks up smoothly and accelerates without fuss and without dropping a gear. It’s not the urgent thrust of a one-litre engine, but it’s enough to propel me past a couple of cars with ease. All the time, the four-cylinder engine remains serenely smooth and feels totally understressed.
On faster A-roads I start to explore the bike’s potential a bit further. Holding onto the revs past 5000rpm uncovers a different side of the Honda’s character to its sophisticated town manners. It’s not that there’s a significant step in the power delivery, because there’s not – the conservative valve overlap sees to that. In fact, the CB750 engine is in a fairly mild state of tune. But as you increase the revs, the speed increases in a linear way – more revs, more speed. There’s no point revving the engine to its 8500rpm redline either. You’ve got pretty much all you’re going to get by 7500rpm or thereabouts, but that’s one of the Honda’s strengths, not a weakness.
The fact is, even at 5000 revs in top, I’m travelling far faster than I ought to be. And that’s in 2018. In 1969 this sort of performance would have been sensational. Of course, there were other bikes around that could, perhaps, have matched the Honda in terms of the bare figures – but I doubt any could have matched the ease with which the CB750 went about its high-speed business or the way it coped with sustained high speeds. The plain truth is, the CB750’S performance, 50 years on from its launch, remains as much as most riders will ever need. They may want more, they may enjoy more and they may appreciate more, but a top speed over 120mph and the ability to get to the ton in under 13 seconds is probably enough for most classic riders.
So it’s fast, but what about handling and braking? Over the years the CB750 has attracted its fair share of criticism on both counts, but I’m not sure that’s justified. Certainly, early road tests of the CB750 rated the handling favourably. I find a neutral feeling to the steering, more than acceptable high-speed stability and a lovely balance to the bike once on the move. I’ve got no real complaints about the Honda today and, while it is considerably heavier than its contemporary, twincylinder competition, I’d have thought it would have felt pretty good to ride in 1969, too.
Most criticism of the bike’s handling probably surfaced later in the CB750’S 10-year production run, as the competition improved. But it was the Honda that forced its rivals to get better. And, I’m also convinced that tyres are critical to getting the best from a CB750. Modern tyres transform the behaviour. Maybe the originalequipment Japanese Dunlops just weren’t up to the standard of the rest of the bike’s equipment.
It’s a similar story with the singledisc front brake. Period testers loved it, while these days people rubbish it. But I’d rather have a wellmaintained Honda disc than any single-leading-shoe front stopper from 1969. Of course, twin discs would have been more powerful and braking systems did improve in leaps and bounds following the four’s launch, but I still say it’s an above-average stopper for 1969 – and a decent enough one now.
Cruising back to David Silver’s after a morning on the sandcast, I’m still impressed at the bikes sophistication, smoothness and presence. It’s still a great looking bike, it still packs enough punch to excite and its level of equipment is staggering for a 50-year-old machine. And everything – from the indicators to the electric starter – all still functions faultlessly.
To me, that answers any lingering questions about the CB750’S credentials as the first genuine superbike. It might not have been the finest machine ever by every possible individual measure, but as an overall package it was incomparable in 1969 – and remained so for several years. The CB750 was definitely a huge leap forward in road bike design and technology. Honda had showed what was possible and the rest had to catch up – quickly – or go to the wall. It was that good.
And it still is. The riding position, with the high Us-spec ’bars suits me more now that it perhaps would have when I was a speed-crazed youth, I can still live with that single-disc brake and 123mph is fast enough for me these days, too. Yes, I still think the CB750 was the first genuine superbike in 1969. It’s also a great looking bike with its four-into-four exhaust and Candy paintwork – and one that remains a practical everyday classic after half a century. That’s some achievement.