WORDS: ALAN CATHCART
PICS: KYOICHI NAKAMURA/STEPHEN DAVISON
HONDA’S 1998 PRODUCTION TT WIN
If you’re, er, mature enough to have attended the Isle of Man’s 1998 TT Fortnight, it could never have slipped your notice that Honda was celebrating its corporate 50th anniversary that year. For this was the time and place chosen by Honda Europe for a big-time birthday party on two wheels, with the Japanese firm’s VIPs and media staff shipped to the Island in waves from all over the world to celebrate. If not for Suzuki’s astute hijack of the covers for the TT course’s thousands of straw bales, a visitor might have been forgiven for doubting the existence of any other motorcycle company, so completely did the Honda publicity machine gift-wrap the Island for its company bosses - an impression reinforced as Honda-mounted riders cruised to a succession of clear-cut victories in the TT races themselves. Icing on the cake?
Yes. But while it was one thing to win the Formula 1 and Senior TT races against privateer opposition, using World Superbike spec RC45s flown over specially from Japan to do the business, there was one crucial race Honda HAD to win, where its rivals were assured of a level playing field - the Production TT. Not only were permissible modifications to each bike strictly limited in this race, thus eliminating the advantage of factory machinery like the reigning WSBK champion RC45s, but as a competitive test under real-world riding conditions of Honda’s best-selling CBR900RR Fireblade sportsbike, against its newer Yamaha R1 and Kawasaki ZX-9R rivals, this was a crucial encounter the global marketplace had its eye on. Crunch time
Well, as the record books show, Scotland’s Jim Moodie - another of the canny Celts dominating that era of TT history - did the business for Honda, scoring a hard-fought start-to-finish win in the one-hour three-lap race On his Sanyo Honda Britain CBR900RR, setting new lap and race records and becoming the first man to lap the 37,75 mile
Tadao Baba gifted us the Blade.
TT Course at more than 120mph on a street-legal production bike. Let’s face it, that’s some feat, made all the more meritorious by the fact that a Kawasaki ZX-9RR ridden by Nigel Davies finished in second place, and David Jefferies’ Yamaha R1 in fourth, after dispelling doomsday forecasts before the race that Yamaha’s then-new ultrabike’s fuel tank wouldn’t let its riders complete the race with a single refuelling stop. Fact is, the Blade breezed home to victory, cementing its position at the top of the hypersports honour roll for Honda.
No wonder Fireblade project leader Tadao Baba, who joined Jim Moodie in Victory Circle to celebrate his bike’s achievement, was so thrilled. Moodie and the Sanyo Honda team had proved a point - and in doing so, clocked up a significant milestone in Honda history. Their Production TT race victory was the Japanese company’s 100th race win in the Isle of Man, in the four decades since founder Soichiro Honda first brought his team of 125GP bikes to compete there in 1959, racing for the first time ever Outside Japan.
The man charged by Honda Britain with preparing Moodie’s TT-winning tool was the man who also built the CBR600 that Paul Brown won the 1997 British Supersport title on - Sanyo Honda team boss Russell Savory. This was an arduous responsibility, given Honda’s high TT profile in that year of all years, and the need to make sure that rival manufacturers had no possible grounds for a post-race protest, as Ducati had made in contesting Phil McCallen’s ‘97 win on a Fireblade.
“We had to win the race, but in doing so, make completely sure there was no possible question mark over the way we did,” said Savory. “This meant that prepping the proddie bike actually took longer than building an all-out racer, because we could only do selective assembly of 100% stock parts, rather than source race-quality components to our own specification.”
To do so, Honda Britain supplied Savory’s Hertfordshire-based RS Performance operation with two box-stock Blades still in the crate (one for Moodie, the other for teammate Ian Simpson,
