The Blown Vee Honda CX650 Turbo
NO DOUBT, PART OF THIS REPUTATION IS thanks to the “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” marketing campaign of the 1970s, and that it has produced some very capable – albeit a little dull – bikes throughout its history since leading light Soichiro Honda built his first Dream and Cub models in the early 1950s.
Yet we mustn’t forget that the manufacturing might of Honda has also seen some of the most radical machinery to ever reach production. The sideways thinking behind the petite engineering masterpieces that were the multi-cylinder race bikes of the 1960s, the oval-pistoned NR500 Grand Prix four-stroke or the NR750 road bike that followed it, or the unique thinking behind the Active Radical two-stroke off-road machines of the late 1990s – all have shown that Honda is a company that isn’t just going to follow a well-trodden path.
And Honda’s innovation didn’t just appear for the race bikes, as several
