Lithe Latin lovely
By the mid-1970s both on road and track, the era of the single-cylinder motorcycle was over, killed off by the invasion of faster, more complex, multi-cylinder lightweights from Japan that outperformed the British bikes with half the engine size, and undercut them on price – or so it seemed.
But a decade later, in the mid-1980s, the concept of a light, narrow, lean and lithe single-cylinder road bike, designed and developed in light of modern engineering practice, had made a startling global comeback fuelled by its ironic cult status in an unlikely country: Japan. First Yamaha, then Honda with all their many permutations on the single-cylinder theme, had sold tens of thousands of single-cylinder street bikes in their home market, where the sign of ultimate chic in certain two-wheeled circles was to ride a BSA, Velocette or Ducati single in Tokyo traffic. But being mass-produced, and more to the point made in Japan, the Oriental four-stroke singles just didn’t have the cult status when it came to recapturing that elusive combination of performance, tradition and character that comprises a British single. If only they still made Velos and Goldies and Norton Inters brand-new, Britain’s balance of trade deficit with Japan might have enjoyed a healthy, if unexpected, reduction 35 years ago. But when the dodo got extinct, it stayed extinct: ditto the British single.
There had been various efforts during the 1980s to breed an Anglo-Japanese hybrid which offered the best of both worlds by combining a modern, readily-available Japanese engine in a specially-built British chassis, most notably the 1986 Ikuzawa-Harris Honda TH1R which was arguably the cream of the oriental singles crop. But Anglophile car racer turned bike dealer/builder Tetsu Ikuzawa – Japan’s first driver to reach Formula 1 – never sold as many of the beautifully-made, fine-handling Harris-framed Honda-powered singles as he’d hoped for, since at the sort of money he inevitably had to charge for a hand-made limited-series bike, he found the fact that it had a Honda engine, even one loaded down with special Honda RSC parts, provoked major customer
