THIS is the badge that will appear on the side of the most exotic production bike Honda has ever created when it’s finally unveiled in its finished form just a week and a half from now.
The image comes from a Japanese trademark application and shows the final design for the bike’s logo – the concept shown last year used only the RC213V badge previously used on the firm’s MotoGP machines.
Although we’re still awaiting final confirmation, the bike’s launch now seems virtually guaranteed to take place in Catalunya on Thursday 11 June, just before the MotoGP weekend gets started. At the same time Honda is expected to open the order books and reveal the bike’s price, expected to be well over £100,000.
Rather than being limited in production to a specific number, Honda is expected to build the bikes to order, allowing demand to define the number that are eventually made. That should help stop speculators from snapping them up purely to squirrel away in the hope of making a quick buck. History suggests that tactic might not be a winner anyway, since ‘as new’ examples of the 1992 NR750 are sti1l regularly surfacing after decades in private collections, and fetching prices that don’t represent an above-inflation increase over their new price of £38,000 (£70,000 in today’s money). Any decent investment bond would have achieved a far better return over the intervening 23 years.
Closely related to the open-class RCV1000R open-class bike raced by the likes of Scott Redding last year, sharing a similar chassis to the works RC-V but lacking the seamless shift transmission or pneumatic valve engine, the RC213V-S marks the final culmination of an on-again, off-again plan at Honda to build a road-going MotoGP machine that dates back to the introduction of the V5-powered RC211V back in 2002.
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