The 1960s was a golden period for Honda, where the burgeoning giant from the east demonstrated just what it could design, build and engineer.
The various tiddlers that almost everyone dismissed as being flawed, unreliable, useless and so much more proved to be anything but… much to disgust of the firm’s detractors. The sales of apparently inconsequential step through mopeds to developing nations helped finance better facilities back in Japan which then created larger capacity bikes. The whole thing soon snowballed and helped fund the development of first the sensational CB450 Black Bomber and then the landmark CB750.
As a backdrop to this, the firm had been very successfully utilising road racing as a way to get maximum exposure and PR.
Soichiro Honda had realised that racing success would directly promote his business ambitions and as early as 1959 had bikes competing successfully on
