Back when I was just out of high school and riding my first motorcycle, I wasn’t particularly interested in speed. With a steady diet of late 1970s custom motorcycle magazines feeding my impressionable brain, I lusted after a bike that just plain looked cool (whatever that meant to 18 year-old me.) A Harley Sportster with loud, unmuffled drag pipes and plenty of chrome was my first choice, but on my fast food worker’s salary, a Yamaha XS650 proved a decent substitute. When riding into work for my usual 4 to 11 p.m. shift one evening, I saw a crowd of my co-workers around a motorcycle that was parked up near the McDonald’s entrance. It was one of Honda’s newest high=performance machines, the all-new CBX. I’d read about the high-speed prowess of the six-cylinder beast for months and seeing one was at once confusing and inspiring. Many of the old timer bikers in my area laughed at the advent of ever-faster performance bikes that seemed to grow additional cylinders with each new model year. “Cylinders on a bike are like breasts on a woman” one rider used to say. “Anything more than two is a complete waste.” The CBX’s owner was anything but bothered by the riding public’s love/hate relationship with his beefy, 100-horsepower machine. He just happened to be riding the fastest, most technologically advanced machine on offer back in 1980 and he was understandably proud.
In the ensuing 40 years, I’ve owned dozens of bikes with varying numbers of cylinders and test ridden hundreds, but never a CBX. That’s a shame as Honda’s new wave muscle bike is experiencing something of a renaissance of late, with our magazine’s in-box regularly filled with images of customized examples of the big six. Viewed through 2022 eyes, the CBX does make for a fetching custom ride: dressed up in streetfighter trim, it exudes brawn, it’s broad-shouldered dimensions resembling a two-wheeled Mike Tyson. Come Cafe Racer’s April/May issue, look for a pictorial on customized versions of Honda’s groundbreaking CBX, and if your garage is hiding one, pplease send us some pics to be included. The CBX was ahead of its time = as omly time has revealed.