Back in the big time

There’s little doubt that it must have stuck in Honda’s corporate craw that they had to play around with filthy, smelly, stinkwheels when the company name was synonymous with quality four-strokes. But once Honda had embraced the two-stroke, they did what Honda does best; add genius to a basic concept and make the world take notice.

After taking a ‘career break’ to work on car design, the Big H came back to the world of Grand Prix racing with the now infamous NR500 concept.

At a time when their three rivals were refining 500cc two-strokes, Honda stubbornly stuck to the four-stroke route. To all intents and purposes, the oval pistoned NR500 was an eight-cylinder bike that just happened to have each pair of pistons fixed together in an oval shape. The engine was essentially designed to get around the FIM’s four-cylinder rule and let Honda play at what it did best in Grand Prix racing; multi-cylinder magic. Unfortunately, the project was doomed to failure, so ‘no banana’ for Soichiro on this occasion.

Working against this background, truly the epitome of flawed genius, was an up and coming star from Shreveport, Louisiana, called Freddie Spencer. It was probably this man, more than any other, who demonstrated to Honda that the future of bike racing lay in two-strokes. It must have been a very bitter pill to swallow, but there was no ignoring the facts; two-strokes were the way of the future in pure racing terms.

Once this was openly acknowledged back at headquarters, there was no stopping the mighty force. 1983 saw the company take the world 500cc title with Spencer on board an Erv Kanemoto tuned machine and in 1985 Fast Freddie took the double with titles in 250 and 500 classes. Honda was back – big time.

Off the back of this was a need to sell to the fee-paying customer something that mirrored the track success; the first attempt being the MVX3 250. This bike was not a success and even Honda’s staunchest supporters would have a hard time championing it.

Borrowing looks from the VT250 along with its inboard disc (such a clever idea – not) it could have been a success. Unfortunately, the motor had serious flaws in its design and inception, clearly demonstrating Honda was still on something of a steep learning curve. The MVX3 ran for just two years (1983/1984) before being axed.

Honda had to do something quickly to redress the situation and in 1984 Honda was burning the midnight oil designing and shaking down a prototype that would become the NS250R.

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