CarBrandLogos archive · Honda · 1969

HondaCB750

Four cylinders, a disc brake and a price the British industry could not answer.

Photo: Original uploader was Slarty-bart-farst at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Honda history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Honda CB750, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Honda had built its reputation on small machines, and the received wisdom was that it could not or would not challenge the big British and American twins. The bike shown at the Tokyo show in late 1968 and on sale the following year comprehensively ended that argument. Its specification read like a list of features that had never appeared together on a production motorcycle: a transverse air-cooled four-cylinder engine, a hydraulic front disc brake, an electric starter, five gears, and four separate chromed exhausts. Any one of them would have been a talking point in isolation. Offered together, at a price below a large British twin, they reset what a serious motorcycle was expected to include.

Honda CB750 Special 2007TMS · PekePON · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

The 736 cc single-overhead-cam four was smoother than any parallel twin could be and produced a claimed 67 horsepower, but the figure mattered less than the manner. It would run at those outputs day after day without leaking oil onto the garage floor, shaking its fasteners loose or requiring the constant attention that owners of large bikes had learned to treat as normal. Honda had spent the 1960s learning multi-cylinder engineering in Grand Prix racing, where its four- and even five-cylinder machines revved beyond anything else on the grid, and this was that knowledge applied to something anyone could buy on credit. The earliest examples were built with sand-cast crankcases while Honda hedged its bets on demand; when demand proved enormous the tooling switched to die-casting, and the sandcast bikes became the ones collectors chase.

Honda CB750 01 · yoppy · CC BY 2.0

In production

Competition confirmed the durability. Dick Mann won the 1970 Daytona 200 on one, settling any remaining argument about whether the engine could survive sustained abuse. In the aftermarket it became the default starting point for drag racing, endurance racing, and the whole café and street custom trade, with frame builders like Rickman and Egli producing chassis specifically for the engine. The word superbike attached itself to the class the machine had created, and stayed.

Honda CB750SC Nighthawk 1982 · Menright63 at English Wikipedia · Public domain

Legacy

The consequences in Britain were severe. Triumph and BSA had nothing at the price with anything approaching the refinement, and their answer, the three-cylinder Trident, arrived without a disc brake or electric start and cost more money. Within a few years the traditional British industry had effectively collapsed, and while the CB750 was not the sole cause of that, it was the machine that made the gap impossible for buyers to ignore. Honda kept the name working for decades, moving to a twin-cam engine in 1979 and running it, latterly on the Nighthawk, until 2008. The original K0 remains the reference point: the moment a large motorcycle stopped being a machine you maintained and became one you simply rode.

At a glance

The facts that define it.

Produced

1969–2008

Technical specification

The CB750, in detail.

Production: 1969–2008
Class: Sport bike or standard
Engine: 736 cc SOHC air-cooled straight four (1969–1978); DOHC air-cooled straight 4 (1979–2003, 2007)
Transmission: 5-speed manual, chain final drive
Assembly: Wakō, Saitama, Japan; Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan; Suzuka, Mie, Japan
Manufacturer: Honda