It’s 1968 and the global motorcycle industry is just about the get the biggest shock of its life.
After dabbling in the smaller bike categories and establishing a good foothold there, Honda exploded into the big bike scene at just the right time. Harley-Davidson is continuing to build outdated, unreliable machinery and the Brits are making vibrating twin-cylinder bikes (oil leaks have Norton part number). Whether it was prescience or just plain good luck, Honda is about to pounce.
The bike that changed everything, forever, was the Honda 750/4, a bike so influential it’s still regarded as the father of the modern motorcycle.
There had been four-cylinder bikes before. There had been fast bikes before. Even reliability had been mastered (by a few). But only the 750/4 combined all those elements into a single model that, overnight, turned the market upside down.
Not only did the new Honda accelerate faster than a British twin, it did so while keeping its lubricant inside its engine.
It could be ridden fast, it could be ridden long distances. And when you parked it, you knew that it would start tomorrow without a quick rebuild in the driveway.
Without being there, it’s hard to imagine the impact this new Honda had on the world, but when hardened bikers were trading their old machinery in on brand-new 750/4s, you sensed that a new age was dawning.
And it was. Never before had 200km/h performance and total reliability been so within reach of the average bloke in the street.
But even beyond that, the fact that you could now own a motorcycle and not have to know how to fix it by the side of the road opened up a whole new group of potential buyers.
There was an element of techno gee-whiz about the Honda, too. Things like overhead camshafts and all-alloy construction weren’t new, but they weren’t exactly commonplace, either, and were even rarer all in one place.
Forget that the Honda was, in some aspects, built down to a price and forget the fact that it was a bit heavy and didn’t handle as well as some contemporaries.
Because when it comes down to it, if you’ve ever owned a large-capacity, four-cylinder road-bike with a Japanese badge, you owe a debt of thanks to that original 750/4.
And it was going to be so for a couple of years at least (until Kawasaki broke the gentlemen’s agreement not to produce something bigger than 750cc)