There was genuinely a time when riders seriously questioned the purpose of Honda’s GL1000 flagship – the Gold Wing.
At its UK launch in 1975 few could grasp why anyone might want a one-llitre, liquid-cooled, flat-four that weighed in at 273 kilos… dry! It wasn’t in the mould of anything else out there and few could see a real and genuine purpose for its existence. Some 48 years later the original machine has sprouted two more cylinders and almost doubled in capacity so there’s little argument The Big Aitch wasn’t on to something special when its blue-sky research team first drew up the sketches.
To date the GL, in all of its various guises, has sold
