Honda's NR500 GP racer and NR750 endurance racer and 1994 $60,000 streetbike launched a million dreams but were failures in the grand scheme. The bikes were beautiful innovations and technical striving during a magic time at Honda when the company explored anything that seemed possible. Learn more about the 8-valve-per-cylinder four-stroke V-four that acted like a V-8 and aimed for 22,000 rpm in racing form. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron heard the NR500 at Monza, and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer, like many, bought a 1995 Honda VFR750 because it had echos of the NR750. Listen now to learn about these amazing motorcycles and their oval-piston engines!
Read the Kevin Cameron tech feature on the Honda NR500 and NR750 on cycleworld.com: https://www.cycleworld.com/blogs/ask-kevin/honda-nr500-failure-or-success/
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Read the Kevin Cameron tech feature on the Honda NR500 and NR750 on cycleworld.com: https://www.cycleworld.com/blogs/ask-kevin/honda-nr500-failure-or-success/
Subscribe to Cycle World Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/cycleworld?sub_confirmation=1
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Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
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SportsTranscript
00:00Welcome to the Cycleworld podcast we posted every Wednesday. I'm with Kevin
00:06Cameron our technical editor and I'm Mark Hoyer editor-in-chief. This week
00:13we're here to talk about Fali Adu or the craziness in a group.
00:18That's what I thought of when we discussed doing the Honda NR500 and also
00:23of course the subsequent NR750 the $60,000 exotic that launched a zillion
00:33dreams. What impresses me about all of this is Honda's I don't know
00:41institutional insanity or I mean it just was so especially during this time
00:47Honda's technical explorations I mean really from kind of the late 70s I mean
00:53all the way back to 69 I guess if you want to argue with the CB750 but they
00:57just tried things and they they did mass production and low production and did so
01:02many exotic things and you know this NR750 you know I was a motorcycle
01:11shopper in 1995 and I bought a VFR 750 as my first new motorcycle ever because
01:19it had echoes of NR750 which I could never have and I still never have and I
01:24did not ride and and here we are so we're gonna talk about the NR500
01:28because that's where this stuff came from and then we'll you know get to the
01:33750 as well. What's your take here Kevin because you were there. Well this whole
01:42thing is wonderfully complicated by the fact that any large organization like
01:50Honda has a public relations department that is under conflicting orders and
01:59objectively the NR500 failed to win the World Grand Prix road racing
02:07championship so that's a demonstrable fact. On the other hand the Honda public
02:14relations people never cease to to whack the drum whose reverberations are but we
02:21learned so much and we never intended to win the World Championship anyway and
02:27one of the engineers who was involved in the project Toshimitsu Yoshimura said
02:36not too long ago now that I look back on this it's very difficult for me to
02:43understand whether we were engaged in a sensible enterprise or whether we were
02:51just a little bit crazy as you said and when I tried this idea on Mr. Nakamoto
02:59who was the oh what would I call him the bulwark of Honda in MotoGP he said
03:10no Honda does not fail. So this stirs things up but on the other hand if we
03:22could we could I have a little list here of innovations that were included
03:27starting with the oval piston which allows each piston to be served by not
03:35four not five not six but eight valves. Well I mean in a sense what we're
03:41talking about is is it's notionally actually so it's a v4 four-stroke with
03:46oval pistons so oval pistons that are you know they're oval it's crazy. They're
03:5193 millimeters wide and something like 41 millimeters deep and they're
03:57equivalent in area to a single round piston of 66.4 millimeters. Right and so
04:04what we're looking at is essentially notionally a v8 except that it's a four.
04:08That it's pairs of its pistons sort of fused together kind of like conception.
04:16Anyway some of the little projects that were involved in trying to make this
04:21thing succeed monocoque frame side mounted radiators rising rate rear
04:26suspension upside down fork the oval piston of course 16-inch wheels Dunlop
04:34made tires for them carbon brakes slipper clutch. Now what's remarkable here
04:43is well all of this in what year let's yes what happened was that Honda's second
04:51president Mr. Kawashima decided in 1977 at the introduction to the to the CBX
05:00the inline six said oh by the way Honda is going to return to Grand Prix
05:06motorcycle road racing and they did so in an enormous way and they spent
05:13fantastic sums of money and they put their very best people on this project
05:19and some of those people would be Mr. Fukui, Mr. Kanazawa, the legendary
05:27Shoichiro Irimajiri who was responsible for the later of the fantastic 22,000
05:37rpm creations of the 1960s that Honda raced in in Grand Prix and there were
05:47many other engineers besides so this was a high priority we're going to stomp them
05:53flat kind of project and they bundled these engineers off to a closed for the
06:02season hotel up in the mountains and in the Nasu Highlands and where they
06:08complained that the heating system was off and that they had to wrap themselves
06:13in blankets and while they were there they made drawings and conceptual
06:18preparation for testing the idea of oval pistons and they went at this in a very
06:27methodical way they built a single cylinder test engine first to check the idea that an
06:33oval piston could even work it was based on an XL 250 bottom end it had a single
06:40connecting rod controlling this sort of ice cream sandwich of a piston and
06:49they were able to verify that they could seal a bore an oval the early ones were were not
06:57as oval the were the early ones not they were flat on the front and back and the ends were
07:03semi-circles yes that's correct okay semi-circles but not there wasn't one that was like uh i
07:08thought there was one that was more like a flying saucer almost that had more kanazawa
07:16they had ring seal problems even when they were able to reach 15 000 rpm they the thing made some
07:24smoke and so all these problems are being worked on simultaneously this was a very expensive
07:32project for them but they were really putting their collective shoulders to the wheel
07:39and so the project marched along just like any other project like if you're well we've decided
07:46that the president says we're going to the moon so we'll need this rocket so let's get busy
07:51gotta set a date you know you gotta set a date or it doesn't happen yeah and uh it moved along
08:01really quite well and ultimately they did get 135 horsepower at variously 18 500 19 000 or 19 500
08:15rpm somewhere in there but they weren't able to reach the 23 000 that they had originally
08:21projected because that would have subjected the pistons to a reversing stress that was 30 percent
08:30higher than that being used at the time in formula one so uh we can't claim they weren't bold
08:38we can do it let's try that would be that would be because of the mass of the piston because yeah
08:44and then the uh i mean any piston that's subjected to say a 10 000 g is going to be a pretty special
08:53piston and there are street bikes now that have that at peak revs it's 7 000 times the acceleration
09:04of gravity when the piston stops at top dead center and then yanks back down so in normal
09:13normal performance range is sort of 5 000 right like sort of what we target is like hey yeah
09:18something that's that's substantially above anything that a manx norton ever saw
09:24so uh yes there has been progress we're not just it's not just an anthology of press kits
09:31going to war here but uh they went very methodically they had k 00 which was the
09:40first test engine k0 tested the idea of two connecting rods and uh the original test engine
09:50had two valves all they were interested in was the idea of can we solve can we seal the piston
09:56they felt they could do it well enough to proceed so k0 uh as counting down had uh the the two
10:05connecting rods and ultimately eight valves and then they went from that to the v4 layout the v
10:12angle was 100 degrees to make room for all the uh there were four two throat carburetors of 30
10:20millimeters so there's a bunch of carburetors in there and they fairly quickly got to 90 horsepower
10:30then 100 then 110 and all the time all these terrible things are happening one of the most
10:38terrible is when you think of there being two connecting rods on each piston you know that
10:45they have to move in parallel the whole time but what happens if the crankshaft is twisting a little
10:52bit then one rod is this way and one rod is this way well sometimes the engine would stop on the
10:58dyno and they'd pull the head off there'd be no piston nothing just a rod sticking up high
11:08and what was happening was that this uh unsymmetrical uh alignment of forces was
11:17exerting um damaging force on the piston which then just broke up so each one of these problems
11:26had to be dealt with and there were many they had problems with valve springs oh they brought
11:30in a material specialist and he said mar aging steel well mar aging steel was what they made the
11:39the um 260 inch solid booster shell out of there all the latest stuff went into this and
11:48the problems were put down in methodical fashion and i just can't imagine the amount of money that
11:59was spent because they were told yeah if there's some part you need and it's 500 000 here's my
12:06signature i just what i think of with with an oval piston and essentially trying to do
12:14i mean what is it two combustion all we talk about on the program is like everything goes
12:18back well the combustion chamber is made to be more compact and that light and so now you're
12:22you're making this huge you know like uh cannoli shaped yeah uh combustion chamber so just imagine
12:29i mean i know you're lighting it right you're letting it in two places but uh and the flow is
12:33coming in uh through four intake valves and so you can imagine it produces the same tumble motion that
12:40we is dear to our hearts yes for its detonation banishing abilities but all this stuff had to be
12:49worked out and so the frightful day of reckoning came in august of 1979 they they shipped two bikes
13:03to mind you two bikes with all those innovations that i just mentioned oh we haven't tried this
13:09fork this swing arm this frame you know you you name it we're going to try them all at once
13:14they they shipped it over to silverstone in england and it was a disaster the bikes were slow
13:22uh mick grant who was one of the two riders katayama was the other mick grant told people
13:32later he said uh they put a limited amount of fuel in the two bikes because all they wanted us to do
13:37was to go out mix it up for a while and then retire because they didn't have any confidence
13:45that they would finish so mick grant got to the first turn and the bike tipped over and caught
13:51on fire and burned up and katayama i think did nine laps and had um what many team managers resort
14:00to ignition failure yeah we don't make ignitions yeah harley davidson it was a magneto failure was
14:08a perennial favorite when their bikes didn't finish yeah that's uh that's pretty classic
14:13racing line you'll be and it and you know um they really did fail because the rod came out
14:19of the case and it stopped sparking so yes that's right it's not wrong it's not wrong at all so uh
14:31this this engine still had a roller crankshaft now mind you the cb 750 had a plane bearing
14:43crankshaft they were putting that thing into production it was their first production four
14:47cylinder all the people who had heard in racing news for years and years honda fours win again
14:55could have their own honda four and they sold the daylights out of those things
14:59but for nr they went with the pressed together crankshaft and it
15:09had basically uh two crank pins with a bunch of connecting rods on each one and
15:18uh heavy counterweights because when you do as an essentially 90 degree twin the counterweight
15:26is equal to 100 of the reciprocating weight in one cylinder so it's a hefty counterweight
15:34more usual is 50 percent um but this made the crankshaft pretty heavy and they had
15:44engine braking trouble of course you don't see this on the dyno but on the racetrack when the
15:49rider closed the throttle back tire went hop skip jump and this was when the slipper clutch was
15:59invented because they said we're going to sit here in this meeting until somebody comes up
16:04with an idea that sounds like it can work and what somebody came up with was uh those ramps
16:12in the clutch such that when the rear wheel drives the engine as when you've closed the
16:17throttle it reduces the pressure on the clutch stack allowing it to slip and they weren't slow
16:25in applying this because in 1982 not that much longer not much after that like the next year
16:32uh they put a slipper clutch on the fws that freddie spencer and mike baldwin rode in the
16:39daytona 200 and all these all these wonderful innovations originated in this project but
16:56it never won a grand prix point and i was uh standing in the shade the monza in italy was a
17:08a grand public park with 100 foot shade trees it's just beautiful there oh i got to see uh
17:14troy baileys make his world superbike debut they they plucked him from vanson hines because carl
17:19fogarty had broken his humerus the thing that kind of basically ended his career and uh i got to see
17:25troy uh troy race at monza um and you know along with colin edwards and yanagawa and uh and all
17:33those guys what a beautiful suspect yeah it was the hunting ground for the royal family back in
17:38the day they would uh it's their private uh private park and then a public park and you just
17:43it's so great to go to the track because you're you're driving through this park with these grand
17:48trees and people are just you know they're eating breakfast you know they're just sitting in the
17:52park and then you you get in and there's all the old banking and you know chicanes and all that
17:57seems very uh 1890s i expect to see ladies in those tremendous dresses with parasols it's a
18:05fantastic anyway i had the privilege of hearing the nr 500 uh start and run and warm up and run
18:14and also on the racetrack and when they started it it just sounded like a great big old superbike
18:21absolutely no difference had that that thunderous uh idle which in this case was
18:28around 7 000 rpm i'm going to say five at least it's a but you know this brings up another point
18:33on monza and that is all those trees the sound is amazing the sound echoes through the trees
18:41and it's different than any other track i've been to it really has a has a very unique feeling
18:47called it the uh they call it the temple of velocity i think it's like basically you know
18:52they're there and there is there is a little brick brick paved enclave with garages around
18:59three sides and when i walked in there it was it was 1950 and i could imagine that fangio's car uh
19:09mercedes was being rolled backwards out of one of those garages so monza has some flavor i'm sure
19:15there's a moto guzzi v8 story in there somewhere right it has to be well i when i was there a few
19:21years later i stumbled on i went down this avenue and there was a kind of shed there
19:27and i walked in since nobody said stop halt or whatever and there was this huge collection
19:36of chilera race bikes from the single cylinder saturno 500 all the way to a selection of the 500
19:44force it was it was like people pressing drunk making drinks on you one after another and being
19:52only unable to refuse any of them it was it was fabulous so first of all i was delighted with that
20:01that super bike sound when this thing is warming up it just i am a four-stroke on the racetrack it
20:09sounded like an rg 500 suzuki because the firing frequency if they were up shifting at 18 five or
20:18or 19 000 was quite close to the firing frequency of a two-stroke at 11 000 and so that was cute
20:29but the bikes were heavy and first they were close to 300 pounds and while the people back
20:42home were so delighted to have equaled the horsepower of the suzuki in 82 which was 130
20:51130 the suzuki was 238 pounds and the nr was 298 pounds so basically a 60 pound difference
21:06i mean you're talking about bigger pistons and bigger crank cylinder head full of machinery yeah
21:12and the cylinder head so you just have to throw more stuff at it to control the airflow
21:17and two strokes because the two-stroke has holes in the cylinder wall instead of having valves
21:22the piston is the valve but the two-stroke on the other side of that piece of bread
21:28has to cram two functions into each stroke whereas the four-stroke has one stroke for
21:35each of the four intake compression power and exhaust the four functions the four sacred
21:43imperatives so another one of the problems that they had with the with the nr was
21:52that with eight flat slides all being vigorously sucked hard against the inside of the carburetor
22:01the rider is trying to smoothly roll power on to exit corners and he's pulling and pulling and he's
22:10thinking there's something caught here there's there's there's got to be a stone that's got into
22:16this and then pow and the engine rushes and uh that kind of thing will interfere with your lap
22:25time well back yeah i mean back in the day big old flat slides you could get this you get that uh
22:32i can't get it to go and yeah it goes and it coughs and you go god they called it a real
22:39real hard hit the bang yeah and uh they tried pulleys of various shapes that had greater
22:47advantage over the load when you're just trying to crack it open and of course we all remember
22:54uh the era before fuel injection when people made flat slide carburetors with roller slides
23:01they had vacuum balancing schemes all sorts of things to try to overcome this you could buy
23:06different throttle tubes that were machined in different ways that give you a different
23:10basically different ellipses right that helped oh yeah helped with the initial and it was like
23:15having it was like shifting gears essentially for your uh for your throttle that's exactly
23:21what it was shifting leverage get high leverage at first and then the slides move faster so yeah uh
23:28they with the engine they had the classic problem this was fairly early on of uh instability in the
23:36cam drive now race engines typically have gear driven cams and fairly early in the nr testing
23:45program they they were breaking the gears well this is nothing new cosworth broke uh cam drive
23:51gears in the dfv formula one engine for two years before duckworth devised that that wonderful little
24:01unit that had a ring of tiny torsion bars and a damper so that uh it would clip the
24:11the peak loadings off of of what was being transmitted through the gears that made the gears
24:16live and it had damping to uh so it wouldn't sit there and bounce improved cush drive yes yes and
24:27so these people by grinding their own faces into these problems surely learned a great deal
24:40and so honda public relations are not wrong when they say oh well look at all that we learned and
24:48they also took up the idea of the v4 which has been sort of central to honda's product line
24:57for many years and in fact the v4 is the dominant form in moto gp and i was told by
25:07honda engineer uh when i was over there in 2020 looking at that year's fireblade he said
25:17uh we have we have had um many problems with the uh crankshaft stability in an inline four
25:31but up to 16 000 rpm an inline four is very manageable so it makes a good engine for world
25:40superbike but if we have to go to higher revolutions we need a crankshaft that is shorter
25:47and more robust the v4 crankshaft which has three main bearings and two crank pins and
25:57uh the problem we're talking about here is torsional vibration and
26:06honda has a lot of experience with their formula one engines in trying to suppress
26:11torsional vibration whether it be in the camshaft in the camshaft drive or in the crankshaft itself
26:18and some of their engine designs have many such dampers in them so this is another area of endeavor
26:27in which uh their faces were uh horribly ground into all these problems so
26:40this was a crash course in in future technologies arguably but at the same time it failed of its
26:51objective and there are precedents for this for example when nsu decided to re-enter
26:59grand prix racing after world war ii there was a period of a few years when
27:07axis countries were not allowed to resume they decided to do this slam bang four-cylinder inline
27:18world beater and they chose for some reason to have separate cylinders and separate heads
27:26and the camshafts and everything else were connected with flexible joints
27:30and when that engine was at speed all those cylinders were waving back and forth and
27:37from side to side and the cylinder heads were doing things and it created first of all it put
27:44the riders hands to sleep so that they would come in and they'd say i see that they're still there
27:49but i don't feel them and they cancelled the project completely and they concentrated on
27:55the 125 single and the 250 twin which were very successful so uh we have the example of moto guzzi
28:05who uh engineer carcano decided okay we're going to enter the 500 class but we're not
28:13racing some derivative four-cylinder and we're not going to do an inline six because it's
28:21this wide so a v8 was the choice and since you can't cool the second row of cylinders with
28:29hot air streaming back off the front row has to be water cooled and what they did was they
28:38bit off a chunk that was too big for their throats and they had an 11-man racing team
28:48and at first they tried to feed all those little carburetors with one float bowl on the side
28:55oh well and then they had different schemes for ignition they had ignition distributors on the
29:03ends of the camshafts that had multiple contact breakers in there and uh just set the timing on
29:10this thing if you've got a minute would you please yeah just just did it you know if you
29:14if you explain to somebody now who's riding an mt07 and you say no no let's go back to an xs650
29:20or an rd and then you know well the lobes aren't exactly right so what you want to do is kind of
29:25split the difference on the timing you know so it's wonderful stuff measure it over here measure
29:31over here and then you know you get a cheap set of points and the heel changes quickly and the
29:37gaps go and you got to tune again we don't have to mess with that unless we want to set the timing
29:42more than once a day um so uh those those problems those nickel and dime problems batteries wiring
29:55uh constant flow level for the carburetors ignition troubles plus the v8 didn't handle well
30:04people did not want to ride it because of its reputation and uh in in uh the end of the 57th
30:12season everybody but mv uh decided to withdraw from grand prix racing and they didn't have to
30:18persist with it but that is another example of a an extremely ambitious project which produced
30:27this fascinating prototype a series of them and there is the the first year the 1979 nr 500 in
30:38the motegi museum uh go see it it it doesn't look that troublesome it's just this neat little
30:46motorcycle well the success of the project i think is is this glow that continues with honda
30:54today even when they wander off and they do interesting things like ctx 1300s you know
31:00strange sort of cruiser-ish scooter-ish but big hybrid type bikes you know they go off on these
31:06tangents and high like you know nr um you know mileage bikes or pacific coasts you know they
31:16they forge off all these things yeah but they do these these interesting things like oh we're going
31:21to make motorcycles so convenient that car people are just going to throw their cars away and ride
31:26the pacific coast and go grocery shopping and there was a lot of there were a lot of practical
31:30ideas in the pacific coast um but at the same time they're doing nr 500s the nr 750 endurance
31:37bikes or 87 uh you know they're doing all this oval pistons gear driven cams and all this
31:45exotica and then they make a vfr 750 and you get the gear driven cams and you get the v4
31:53and you get this sound and you get a piece of that you feel like you get a piece of it that
31:58doesn't cost sixty thousand dollars or infinite sums of money than an r500 might have cost
32:04and you get a piece of that and you get that feeling you know when people always say honda
32:09technology you know they are like honda engineering standards honda technology yes and it's it's really
32:16it's this ongoing drive that they've had and they're exotics you know we road tested an nr
32:22750 we had to sign contracts with the attorney because this guy the it was the only one available
32:28in the states honda can't provide a test bike and it was like this big draft and like can't drag
32:34strip test that do all this and that it performed well but you could spend a lot less and get
32:39similar performance sure and it's sort of like that with you know you look at the more recent rc
32:45213b and you know in america it's limited to 100 horsepower and to try and get the the equipment
32:53that might wake it up is made incredibly difficult because honda doesn't want to mess with the epa so
32:59like here's your 100 horsepower bike that's a that's a moto gp bike so it's so interesting
33:05and you can call it a motorized replica because 100 horsepower is is not similar to the power
33:14required well it was it was you know a motivated owner and in europe you could get you can get all
33:19the kit parts to make it uh bring bring the glory to you pep it up pep it up yeah but um i felt like
33:27the rc 213v was a really key product at the time that it came out because honda had gone you know
33:35post 2008 it was we're going to rethink the motorcycle as a practical affordable
33:43thing for these customers you've always said you know honda sometimes uh
33:48builds motorcycles for customers that wish existed they wish that they had yes and um so it's it it
33:57was interesting and i was at lunch with a couple of honda folks during that time and they were
34:02asking questions and we were discussing it and i said you know you guys need another nr you know
34:07you need this flagship thing and sure enough they were they were on the cusp of releasing that and
34:12it sort of says hondas we're still here we're still doing this yeah and it was a beautifully
34:19made motorcycle it was just lovely yeah i went over to uh barcelona to see that thing
34:26um where they had the an intro in this in this geodesic dome room with all the
34:33thunderous music and what have you uh but the motorcycle itself was was very attractive well i
34:41i got my uh vfr a 1995 vfr 750 from the kind of legendary southern california honda dealership
34:49levard and underwood and they had done some racing and it was just a it was a very rich dealer they
34:54had a bunch of um interesting motorcycles and that that's where i got it and then uh you know
35:00i rode the daylights out of it and i needed to i picked up a puncture and i needed to change the
35:05tire and on that bike you take off the exhaust pipe it goes uh goes up and you just take off
35:11the pipe and then you do your lug nuts because you got the single-sided swing arm i mean honestly
35:18so so cool lug nuts take those off and it was very convenient and easy went did that and i was
35:23sitting there and i had the thing on the stand and i was like hmm i wonder how because i had a stock
35:28exhaust system i said i wonder how this sounds because it's just a nice little clamp you undo
35:32the bolts and come off it goes you kind of rotate a little bit took it off and i fired it up with
35:37straight pipe and all i could hear was nr 500 at manza i mean it was just it was so good yeah
35:45but it fired the dreams you know nr 750 still for you know for anybody particularly who was
35:52who was there or at a very impressionable age as i was uh it it's deep it's deeply ingrained
36:00the visions of uh you know the one piece tank and tail section and the pipes coming out up and the
36:07vents and slats and yes well one of the japanese engineers said that for him he said
36:15some of the redness in the in the blood of later models is flowing from nr 500 oh yeah and of course
36:24what has flowed is uh the experience of engineers who were given
36:32the resources to play this very expensive game and that is where the transistor came from at bell
36:43labs they basically said all right all you guys are real wicked bright and so forth and you're
36:48we're going to pay you to come up with different ideas play with whatever uh strikes your fancy
36:56and gradually over the years they had to get sensible and say don't invent anything unless
37:03we can sell it and be uh in the in the profit side by friday and so no more bell labs but for a while
37:13it was a it was a wonderful a wonderful thing you could also make the analogy of war because
37:21the language that surrounded the initial nr effort was we're going to revalidate the four-stroke
37:30principle and of course they knew perfectly well what was necessary they said uh the cylinder
37:38filling of the two strokes is now very good at 11,000 rpm and in order to get that we're going
37:45to have to turn twice as many rpm so it was just a mechanical problem and they had trouble with
37:52valve trouble with valve springs trouble with the cam drive uh you name it they encountered it
37:59but as in war they say if we can't detect enemy aircraft on their way here they'll just
38:08bomb the daylights out of us so get busy with this this radio wave reflecting gizmo of yours
38:17and make one that works and they did it was called chain home and they were able to
38:23detect german aircraft on their way to bomb britain yeah i mean in a way it's i mean that's
38:29that's patronage in a very traditional sense that the government's just throwing money at something
38:35yeah get it done with a possible solution maybe maybe it's a solution just like pain you know
38:41just like the kings and queens would pay the artists to sit around and compose things for them and
38:46um honda you know it's doing the same thing you have to have that person with the creativity and
38:57drive and then there has to be a facility that would allow the making of it and also the funding
39:04of it so it's you know we have the britain the one man in a shed type idea and which is you know i
39:12mean it's what we want to believe and of course he was the driving force but he had a team that he
39:19built one way or another and honda has that and uh you know you're you related the story about how
39:27erie was your imagery was sitting at the stoplight looking up in the sky that's the official story
39:33looking up the sky and saying to himself huh i wonder if an oval piston would work
39:37you know and then taking that taking that that little germ of an idea and
39:44you know why even try you could you could so easily crush that out like what's a like
39:49what the what you know like why what are you talking about steve get out of here you know just
39:57yeah get on the job bring that to the friday meeting and you're out of here
40:02yeah i mean it's just like why would you do that but it is you know honda's always had an
40:07kind of an adherence to the four-stroke they really wanted four strokes to be the thing
40:13not turbos a lot of times
40:18and you know they explored this and the nr 500 did its thing and then
40:26you know they looked over here and said well these two-stroke things what about that
40:30yeah well miyakoshi um mr miyakoshi was at mx block which is a you know a unit of the r&d and
40:43i imagine that he had been consulted and he had said we have we're getting very good results with
40:50large area reed valves not those little dinky things that yamaha have been using
40:57and uh we'd like to try them and mr miyakoshi had also been to asan earlier that year i think
41:08and while he was there he noticed that the lap times for the 350s which were chiefly
41:15yamaha twins tz 350s and the 500s weren't that different
41:20and but the 350s were 270 pounds uh maximum and the 500s were um maybe a bit more by then anyway
41:34he said what if we could build a 100 horsepower 250 it would be faster than 350 it might be faster
41:44than the 500 especially since tires are becoming such a problem in the 500 class
41:52because they were getting 10 good laps from the tire after which it sort of turned to grease
41:59and you had to spend the last laps you weren't going to be in any battles
42:03but you might be able to keep the guys behind you from passing you and so
42:09finally mr fukui said we will set aside the four-stroke project for now and concentrate on
42:16ns 500 ns standing for new sprint i'm told and when they went racing with it in 1982
42:28with none other than freddie spencer uh at the controls um and freddie was in his
42:37period of grace it's it appeared for quite some time that freddie was protected by some
42:48extraterrestrial force and of course the value of this is it gave him a lot of confidence
42:55the front end is going to hold into the corner he goes well he won a race the very first year
43:03that they brought that motorcycle he won spa which is a very fast racetrack on this 108 horsepower
43:12three-cylinder that did not tear up the tires why didn't the four cylinders just
43:18passed him because they knew please tires be there on lap 24
43:26and then in 1983 freddie was world champion on the three-cylinder by then they'd got it up over
43:32120 horsepower um new pistons were coming every week freddie was going through a set of crank cases
43:42every 360 miles um it was being it was a project that was being kept alive by honda research
43:52they just were were doing an nr on that thing and then for uh 84 they came with the four-cylinder
44:01the nsr 500 and proceeded to basically dominate the class and mcduin won
44:15five 500 world championships in a row what a time it was to watch that just yeah it was it was
44:23artistry and of course there were people who who called at the end of sport there always are
44:29and they urged him to slow down and make a race of it what is the race then just guys going like
44:35this well that's the classic bubba show work thing is that they they gave him the rs 750
44:40and dirt track the honda rs 750 and they told them only not because they were trying to make
44:47a race of it but they didn't want to win by too much because very important they would be restricted
44:54so it's like just just stay just ahead of them don't don't dip into that last bit you know you
45:00got unless you really have to so it's quite a game it's not just speed but fast politics
45:07well i got sent to jerry branch's dino to do to be the ama observer during the restrictor tests and
45:16of course basically what it was we'd have to slow these hondas down so that racing will return to
45:22normal and they succeeded in that to a degree and honda after seeing that they would be defeated
45:33politically rather than mechanically wisely put that effort aside and the xr 750 went on to
45:44complete its career yeah but it was grand in that in that dino room because i'm looking around in
45:52there and there's the uh xr screaming away in the test cell and i'm looking at the only door
46:02in the instrument room it goes into the test cell so what if the engine explodes and catches fire
46:11how do we get out we go towards the fire
46:16but uh it was an education being there to see all the all the uh the professionalisms of
46:25of uh jerry branch's test setup yeah well that this brings to mind hrc and then honda racing
46:35services so nr would have started during racing services is that right 77 that was right in there
46:45and then imagine imagine hrc at that time and all the things it must have felt like
46:53living in the future or some version of it sure and i mean imagine passing through the hrc doors
47:00which you did a couple years ago for the fireblade the sp the pirate model as they call it
47:05the cbr rr r closest i got to it was a a conference room with a really nice wood table and there was a
47:14place for us to put our coats and they took us downstairs to an empty room with lifts and they
47:23said the moto gp team is away in malaysia right now but they if they weren't they would be right
47:29here hard at work preparing for the next test or the next race so i didn't get to see it but i got
47:38to see where it took place yeah that's great so i think that that uh these projects have
47:52tremendous value i'm sure that the individual engineers who were working for brm
47:59in the late 1940s when they developed that supercharged v16 race car
48:07learned a great deal and one of the most valuable lessons is it's possible for a project to exceed
48:15the r&d resources of the creating company that's what happened with the v16 it happened with the
48:22good cv8 and it happened with the nr the nr uh was striving to beat the two strokes at a time when it
48:34was much cheaper to increase to boost two-stroke horsepower by five than it was to do it with a
48:41four-stroke because with the four-stroke everything would have to be redesigned okay
48:46we're going for the next five horsepower require a new uh iteration of the engine whereas with
48:53with the the two strokes they they were basically still working on exhaust pipe shape uh port sizes
49:01and direction crankcase pumping and all the add-on devices like the exhaust eyelids
49:08and honda came up with water injection for their two-stroke if the rider made a terrible mistake
49:16and found himself at 6 000 rpm he's just going to sit there but with honda's water injection system
49:25it sprays water into the exhaust pipe the water evaporates reducing the temperature of the gas in
49:32the pipe so that the pipe instead of resonating up here resonates down here and suddenly you have
49:38mighty torque at six and away you go i'm just gonna thank you on behalf of all of our spotify
49:44listeners for using audio uh audio elaboration well well it was a beautiful uh a beautiful time
49:58and i think i think much respect to honda for uh for making all of these uh technical forgings
50:07and and doing all of that it certainly informs the company today even and um they got me even
50:16though they're in deep in this moto gp thing because of course they're they and yamaha have
50:23basically they're like two years behind everyone else how it happened i'm not sure uh but it's now
50:31a european series it used to be the japanese series with european um wannabes and now it's
50:40reversed it's fabulous and of course uh the japanese will come back or they won't they may say
50:50these markets are no longer important to us we are now operating in southeast asia we don't know
51:00i hope that they put their shoulders to it and we could get to see something uh surprising
51:07well bring back the oval piston what do you say
51:10probably not legal anymore they were legal for a long time in all all forms
51:14of if i am but uh well of course the original reason for the oval piston was to provide more
51:19valve area they're saying oh a two valve or a four valve of a certain size at 20 000 rpm won't breathe
51:27but then along came formula one those v10 engines were revving to 20 000
51:35and making gobs of horsepower so none of this ever sits still somebody's working at it
51:43it's over thank goodness yeah also if you like this podcast kevin cameron has written a feature
51:52about the nr 500 and its developments on the website cycleworld.com you can also go down in
51:57the description we'll have a link there to the story and you can read in even greater detail
52:02than we spent the last 50 something minutes talking about uh nr 500 nr 750
52:09um another great kevin cameron feature so go ahead and check that out well that's it for this
52:14week folks thanks again for listening get down in the comments uh we're really appreciating that as
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52:31um thanks for listening to the cycle world podcast every wednesday take care