THE rumours of a new sports bike from Honda with a V4 engine at its heart have been bouncing around for some time now, with the idea only being semi-officially put to bed by an HRC boss earlier this year.
The thing is, the bike that Tetsuhiro Kuwata (HRC Director and Manager) was referring to, was a full-fat, out and out sports bike with race-winning dreams. He said it was unlikely for Honda to be releasing another sports bike when the latest generation CBR1000RR-R was working well in both BSB and World Superbike.
What he didn’t rule out though was Honda bringing a new V4 format to the roads in a less racy design. Indeed, should ‘Big Red’ want to continue the linage of the VFR nameplate in Europe, it’s going to need to move quickly. The current VFR800F is a bike we are set to lose at the end of this year thanks to incoming Euro5 regulations, and it’s going to take more than just an ECU update and exhaust change to get it through next year’s regulations.
The V4 engine residing in the bike has been around in this guise since around 2013 although it can trace its roots back to the first of the VTEC models of the bike, originally introduced way back in 2002. All manufacturers design and build-in a certain number of regulatory updates within an engine, but even for Honda, dragging a design along with for twenty years a real ask!
What could the new Honda VFR engine look like?
With no official confirmation from within the company as to what the bike will be, we can only go by the accumulation of rumours we have found (not all of which will be correct) and the wealth of patent images unearthed in the last few years. One such image appeared in 2019 and at the time was linked with Honda’s potential new V4 superbike. With that idea now on ice, it’s easy to imagine the tech described in that patent being used on this new more distance inclined machine.
As for the capacity of the machine, it could be the case that the VFR800 becomes the VFR900 or even 1000. The golden rule with updated bike models is always to never lose power, a mantra that Honda has stuck to with it’s 2021 model line-up. With ever-more stringent emissions regs’ and this bike unlikely to receive forced induction, a larger displacement seems like the only way forward for the model.
