Black Bomber

Honda's original CB450 spearheaded the Japanese attack on the performance bike market. Roland Brown rode one to see if the aggressive edge was still there.

Riding down some Oxfordshire lanes on a CB450 all these years later, it's difficult to understand how the gentle middleweight twin can have seemed remotely threatening. The Honda accelerates reasonably enthusiastically, rumbles along without transmitting too much vibration from its parallel twin engine, and even handles quite well. In short, it's a nice enough bike — but it's not very exciting.

The Honda CB450

So this was the big, high-performance machine that spearheaded Japan's conquest of the British motorcycle industry, right? That theory seems far-fetched when you take a trip on the Honda. After all, even back in the sixties, motorcyclists had long been riding round on Triumph Bonnevilles and Norton Dominators with much more performance than this softly-tuned Japanese twin.
But the CB450 was rightly regarded as a landmark machine and a major threat in the mid-1960s. Back then, it wasn't just the largest-capacity bike yet from Japan, it was the first that dared to challenge the British industry's dominance of the big-bike market. "Meet the big black bomber — the biggest, beefiest touring twin from Japan," ran Honda UK's magazine ads, earning the bike the nickname Black Bomber.
Over in America, the industry view of the twin's importance was summed-up by Cycle World magazine, which commented: "Beyond any doubt, the big news item of the preceding 12 months came when Honda finally announced ("admitted" would be a better word) that there was, in fact, a new big displacement addition to their line of motorcycles." Honda was on the attack, and the CB450 seemed likely to be the first of many larger machines.

In many ways the bigger twin was a logical development of the smaller-engined models that Honda had been exporting with increasing success. The CB450 was also the model with which Honda grew up fast in terms of styling. This second-generation version, introduced in 1968, has a more conventional appearance than the initial model, which had a slightly more dated look reminiscent of bikes such as the 250cc CB72.
The CB450 followed the mechanical format of smaller Honda twins, with some notable differences other than simply its increased capacity of 445cc, which came from short-stroke dimensions of 70 x 57.8mm. The most notable change was to a twin overhead camshaft layout, as much used by Honda's racebikes but not its roadsters. The camshafts were turned by a long single chain, which ran from the crankshaft around both cams, helped on its way by several sprockets and guides.

Hopefully I'm not alone in my love of this style of race machine. Since the mid seventies I've harboured a soft spot for those high bar monster muscle bikes that the yanks seemed to have so much fun racing on throughout the 70's and 80's. We in the UK largely missed out on this form of racing so it was with some excitement that the rest of the CMM crew and I arrived at a stiflingly hot Mallory Park to ride a modern day survivor of the breed. Unlike the UK, on the other side of the pond "proper" fully faired race machines regularly did battle with high bar naked road based monsters, bucking the trend for low slung separate clip on bars and big bulky fibreglass work giving the spectator the full "almost on board" experience.
The period was, in racing circles at least, besotted with two strokes of all shapes and sizes. Trouble is; road bikes were and still are mainly four strokes, creating a huge void between the track and the road that wasn't good for showroom sales. Street bike racing was most likely created to form a tangible link between the road bikes and race tackle. The factories enthusiastically backed the class in the US with Freddie Spencer, Eddie Lawson and many more battling it out on some very trick machines season after season.

Arms akimbo
This unique form of racing did enjoy a brief spell of popularity over this side of the pond with the MCN backed Streetbike series of 1981, convincingly won by the factory supported CB1100R ridden by Ron Haslam, riders like future 500 world champ Wayne Gardner and Joey Dunlop following spectacularly in his wake. It was all good stuff but never really captured the UK race audience's attention, and following that short lived series the high bar madness and mayhem all but faded away.
Before too long all road going sports machines came with clip-on style bars, once and for all tying in the race machines with the road bikes, and the high bar muscle bikes disappeared from modern racing forever. There was nobody even trying to recreate this period, I was most surprised during my spell racing with the Forgotten Era boys that such machines, with their wide disposition and bags of character, are actually disallowed from the very class that they should really be allowed to run with. Thankfully the Earlystock's racing club do cater for this period so now there is a natural home for these beauties, the Top Banana team being the leading protagonists within this class with their beautifully prepared machines.

Although several riders are "employed" to hurtle these machines around the UK race tracks the main men within the light-heartedly named team are Glynn Williams and Nigel Lawrence, between them they own a staggering array of machines from the late seventies and early eighties, among them a pair of "Lawson replicas" albeit in a lurid shocking yellow rather than the more eloquent lime green. Whatever the colour scheme the effect on the track is the same with more conventionally mounted racers giving you that extra few inches of breathing space whenever two or more machines are forced into the same piece of circuit. The sheer physical size of the naked Z1 and its impact upon fellow riders means it has often won any out-braking or argy-bargey manoeuvre before the battle has really begun to get serious.

[End of Online Sample]