1972 Honda 750 comparison cycle guide magazine November 1972
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I didn't read it yet - I will later - but is this the article where they're at the drag strip, bikes were running hot (especially the air-cooled 2 strokes) and they said something like "they've been watering those Kawis all day and they haven't grown a bit"...? :lol: that line stuck in my head over the decades
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Like Tom, I haven't read it yet but certainly will this evening, should be interesting reading. Thanks for posting these old magazine articles.
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I read it late yesterday and saw that line - loved it, brought back memories of riding one of those beasts. This was not the superbike shootout article I remembered, it must have been in Cycle magazine where they took them all to the drag strip (as they did in this article) and were running them repeatedly all afternoon long, tweaking little stuff and trying to get the best runs out of each bike. It also might have been a year or so earlier, as I recall the CB750 running a high 12 second quarter mile too. They were using small canister lawn sprayers to spray water on the engine to cool down the only air-cooled 2 stroke (in that article, I think it was the H-1) when that funny statement was made. Odd how stuff like that sticks in your head over the years... like the TT Racer reference in a different issue, where they were actually talking about tavern to tavern
Great stuff Paul - you must have quite a collection of them
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one thing i remembered was about the harley, "in our opinion when it comes to torque, it could give away bags of it and still have more than enough to do the job. we found no situation that the engine could not handle. in most cases it didn't make much difference what gear the transmission was in or what speed was indicated on the speedometer. all that was necessary was to merely dial in more fuel when the rider wanted to go faster."
i found that in my case riding with a friend in high school that had access to his older brother's sportster. i never saw the guy shift, he just stayed in one gear the whole time and just gave it more gas.
i found that in my case riding with a friend in high school that had access to his older brother's sportster. i never saw the guy shift, he just stayed in one gear the whole time and just gave it more gas.
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yeah, there's a lot to be said for low end grunt - but it's also a trade-off for high end horsepower, which is why the Harleys generally lose a drag race against Japanese bikes. Their engine design, which they're still trying to hold onto as it is essentially their marque, is not conducive to high rpm horsepower unless built to the hilt. Japanese bikes come ready to produce horsepower at high rpms, essentially race engines made just docile enough to have good manners for street use
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we are all affected by our beginnings in bikes - Evel Knievel and our local neighborhood Honda salesman were wheelie kings when I started and it created a big interest in me to learn how, and though I rode and owned a lot of dirt/dual-sport bikes during my early years, street riding was my long-term love and speed goes along with it in many cases. as the old expression went, "different strokes for different folks"
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