Das Originals

Forty years ago this summer was a thrilling time for motorcycling, as the superbike came of age with a flurry of spectacular arrivals.

- Roland Brown

Less than a decade after Honda’s revolutionary CB750, the firm launched the six-cylinder CBX1000 – and found it facing straight-four opposition in the form of Kawasaki’s Z1-R, Suzuki’s GS1000 and Yamaha’s XS1100. Suddenly, Japan’s ‘Big Four’ were going head-to-head for the first time, setting the stage for superbike battles over the next four decades and beyond. It had been the CB750 that got the superbike party started, back in 1969. Honda’s four had changed everything, with the power and smoothness of its 736cc SOHC engine and with its electric starter, disc front brake and general sophistication. Four years later, the arrival in 1973 of Kawasaki’s Z1, with its 903cc DOHC engine and maximum output of 82bhp against the Honda’s 67bhp, had dramatically upped the stakes and a new era of exhilarating, 130mph-plus open-class motorcycling began.

But from that point, progress from Japan had been slow throughout the mid-Seventies. Honda had refused to get drawn into a performance war with Kawasaki, declining to update the CB750 with more cubes or twin cams. The GL1000 Gold Wing flat-four, introduced in 1975, produced 80bhp but was too soft and heavy to be a direct rival to Kawasaki, whose Z1 became the Z900 and then the Z1000, with capacity up to 1015cc but look and performance little changed.

The other two Japanese giants had initially seemed uninterested in the four-stroke battle. Yamaha had a strong following with its race-developed RD two strokes, culminating in 1976 with the RD400C, but had limited its four-stroke line to the XS650 family of British-style parallel twins. And Suzuki, producer of the liquid-cooled GT750 triple since the early Seventies, had taken a radically different path with 1974’s introduction of the rotary-engined RE5, which proved unreliable and short-lived.