TRICK KIT TRANSFORMATION
‘Don’t sell that monstrous four-banger just because it wiggles like a wounded snake every time you even think about tilting it from a vertical plane,’said Cycle World in 1974. They were, of course, talking about the five year-old CB750, and familiarity with the four-cylinder superbike had bred a smidgen of contempt for its sporting credentials.
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater: there was a solution which retained the CB’s best attribute – its engine – although the fix didn’t come cheap.‘What you need is a new chassis to put around the mill. One that isn’t designed to be the best for a given price, but one that is designed to be the best.’
Of course, Honda were well aware that their flagship four was coming in for some flak, and attempted to address its issues with the K series of updates that spanned 1971 to 1978. We also shouldn’t get carried away with the notion that between 1969 and 1970 this seminal machine somehow shifted from being the greatest thing since sliced bread into yesterday’s burned toast crusts. Read any of the original roadtests from 50 years ago and you’ll see that the CB750 was initially praised for its stable handling and luxurious ride. Few people mentioned any problems with its chassis. At first.
But if you give motorcycle riders a big fat engine then you have to expect them to use it – and while the CB was ideally suited to America’s freeways and interstates, it didn’t cope so well with twisting British backroads and writhing Alpine passes. Once the four-cylinder fuss had died down and riders could see beyond the shock of
