Honda CBR 1000F

The CBR1000 is Honda's flagship sports roadster. It is not a race replica. It excels or at being a versatile, all-rounder, sports-angled for sure, but ¹ also sensibly equipped with just about everything the fast long-distance rider requires. Call it a deluxe highway express cruiser.

Released in 1987 to universal acclaim, the CBR1000 broke no new ground but underlined the world's largest manufacturer's 20 years of experience at building in-line fours. It is very much a complete motorcycle. The design brief was to build a 1000cc open class sports bike for the road rider. It had to be powerful, comfortable, smooth and sophisticated with styling to match. Honda succeeded on all counts.

The soul of the machine is a fairly conventional short stroke, 16-valve in-line four fed by semi-downdraft Keihin CV carbs. About the only thing that distinguishes it from the many such in-line fours Honda have produced before is the remote oil-cooled generator mounted behind the cylinders. As with the whole bike, what impresses about the engine is not what it is but what it does. For a start, it's uncannily smooth.

 There's no discernible vibration except at the very top of its rev range. It also combines what every engine tuner likes —fat, endless torque with a real top end rev rush. The big Honda is very tractable. It'll pufl top gear from 2000rpm and you can short-shift and stay in top for most day-to-day unhurried riding. It starts making huge liquid power at 6000rpm with a step at 8000 where the engine spins like crazy up to the 10,500rpm redline. You can cruise leisurely on the torque or you can burn rubber by spinning it out above 8000. Sensibly geared with six fairly close ratios, its top speed is 160mph.

The race replicas will certainly beat it for top end and they'll outhandle it on a tight road. However the Honda will never be that far behind and it possesses in abundance what all the sparse, narrow-focus, race replicas lack, which is a high degree of ride comfort.

Again, there is nothing particularly innovative about the rolling chassis, it just all works together and well. The perimeter frame is old-fashioned steel and there's nothing radical about the steering geometry. Suspension is generally soft and only really firms up over the last few inches of travel. The ride is plush and best suited to wide-open sweeping roads. Similarly, the steering is slow but it's also predictable. The Honda can be slammed through a series of quick bends as long as you're deliberate about where you place the front wheel. Slow steering and heavy it may be, but that front end is also very trustworthy. It stays planted on the road. Wheel rim sizes are as big as they come at 3.5in front and 5.5in rear and the elegant, three-spoke wheels wear fat radial tyres.

Thanks to an excellent riding position, ride comfort is assured. There's plenty of room for a pillion and luggage. The aerodynamically efficient ABS fairing fits like a glove and there are no gaps or ill-fitting joins in its smooth lines -even the exhaust pipes get their own fairing cover. The bodywork is protected by unobtrusive 'bamper dampers' which is curious Japanese-speak for metal bumpers with soft plastic covers. If the bike falls over at low speed, the bumper protects the expensive bodywork.

Detail touches abound and the bike is superbly well-finished. The key to the CBR1000's success is that it's much more than the sum of its parts. In isolation, its major components are well-made but unexceptional. But as a rolling package the motorcycle exudes confidence, balance and completeness. A motorcycle for all reasons and all seasons and the best in-line four.

This Retrospective article appeared in the April 2006 issue of Rider Magazine.)

When this big Honda appeared in 1987, it swept through the motorcycle world like a Category 3 hurricane sweeps across Florida…sorry, could not resist.

With more horsepower, more speed than any previous liter bike, it ratcheted the whole performance concept up a notch.
Yes, 600s and 750s may have been important in the racing categories, but the 1000 class was the playground of the truly competent. The game was new, with 10,000 rpm, liquid-cooled engines and serious aerodynamics in the bodywork. Suzuki had opened play with its GSX-R1100, admittedly a little large at 1052.5cc, followed by the Kawasaki Ninja 1000R (997.8cc) and now the 998.4cc Honda, with Yamaha’s FZR1000 (989.6cc) being presented right after the Honda introduction. Note the constant R (for Race?) designation, the hot letter to have, even though these were not intended as track bikes.

Competition was awesome, but what impressed the go-fast motoring crowd was not just Honda’s dyno-tested 110 horsepower-plus at the rear wheel, nor the slickness of the fairing, but that the bike was so rideable. If you were going to put in a couple of hours at the racetrack, comfort be damned. But an all-day ride, that was something different.

A few words on the name. Back in the middle 1950s many British motorcycles had rather pallid names, or merely alpha-numeric designations, and American importers wanted more excitement. In 1957 the Matchless/AJS importer decided to rename the 600cc Scrambler Twins, virtually identical ma­chines which were known rather cryptically as either a G11CS (Matchbox) or a Model 30CS (Ajay). And what should that name be? A Hurricane!

Soon the 600cc Scrambler single was a Typhoon, and the 250 version was a Tornado. Not to be outdone, Ariel renamed its 650 Huntmaster Twin the Cyclone. The Hurricane name disappeared a few years later as the British bike industry slowly imploded, remaining unused until 1973, when Craig Vetter labeled his delicious redesign of a BSA triple a Triumph X75 Hurricane. That brilliant exercise in styling did not last long, unfortunately.

The Honda company had been slow to denote its models with fancy names, but by 1980 the marketing office appreciated that motorcycling types, especially in the United States, liked to have slick monikers for their machines…like Interceptor. It should be noted that name was first used on a motorcycle in 1962, on a Royal Enfield 750 twin. The Inter­ceptor concept, of fast fighter planes, took the public heart with its sense of speed. So why not the power of one of Mother Nature’s wind­­storms?

The Honda Hurri­cane 1000 came along in 1987, re­placing the Interceptor 1000. One has to admire old Soichiro, a brilliant and forceful businessman. He would have been a heckuva poker player because, among his many virtues, he knew when to fold a hand. Like the V-4 Interceptor models. Yes, the name and V-4 still exist in the VFR800 Interceptor, but not like they were touted 20 years ago.

Mr. Honda had put the motorcycling world on its ear when he introduced the CB750 in 1969, an in-line four that was powerful, reliable and inexpensive. Then he decided to trump his own ace, so to speak, when he rolled his 750cc V-4 Sabre and Magna models onto the stage at Marysville, Ohio, late in 1981, followed by the Interceptor 750 a year later. These had twin overhead camshafts, four valves per and, lo and behold, liquid cooling. Soon 500 and 1000 Interceptors joined the fleet, and Honda was waiting for everybody else to copy him.

Except the Interceptors had teething problems, acquired a bad reputation, and were re-engineered to fit into the sport-touring category.

In 1987 the Hurricanes, both 600 and 1000, were the new bad boys on the block, using the liquid-cooled in-line four design that had debuted on Kawasaki’s Ninja 900 in 1984. Nothing radically new was presented in the 1000 Hurricane’s engine, just that in typical Honda fashion, a great deal of R&D effort went into its development. The new motor was a very compact, narrow design, smoothed out by a balance shaft running at twice crankshaft speed. With a 77mm bore and 53.6mm stroke it was the most oversquare of the Big Four’s liter engines of 1987, with big 38mm carbs feeding lots of gas through big valves into big combustion chambers.

The en­gine was essentially a stressed member of the chassis, being bolted securely at five points into the hefty box-style steel perimeter frame, minimizing the possibility of flex. By today’s standards, the suspension was not very sophisticated. The 41mm Showa front fork’s only adjustment was the air pressure, although it did have a hydraulic anti-dive mechanism. The single-shock rear, also Showa, had ad­just­able spring preload and rebound damping. All quite rudimentary by comparison to today’s CBR1000RR (with three Rs!). Six gears were in the transmission.

The most innovative aspect of the Hurri­­cane was the visual—the fairing. No Japanese motorcycle had ever been covered up to this extent, and only the Ducati Paso was more prudish in its effort to con­-ceal what lay beneath. But this was not for looks as much as performance, or, narrowing that down, for top speed. Be­ing able to boast of having the highest top speed for a production motorcycle was con­sidered important to the marketing types, and the aerodynamics of this fairing were excellent. Several testers man­aged to push the Hurricane over 160 mph—to­tally impractical for the average purchaser.
It was the comfort that the customers liked. The handlebars were neither too narrow nor too low, the seat was a pleasure to sit on, and the ergonomics as a whole were fit for a normal human being. Add a pair of throwover saddlebags and a tankbag, and a thousand-mile weekend was a pleasure.

However, the U.S. economy was a bit depressed, sales were lagging, and for 1989 the CBR1000F Hurricane was off the list. Only to reappear in 1990—without the Hurricane name. Rumor had it that with just an alpha-numeric such as CBR1000F the bike would be more insurable, but that a name like Hurricane denoted recklessness and immorality, and brought with it unaffordable rates.

Now you know what’s in a name.