Styled to resemble the RS250RF race bikes, the Honda NSR250 used a gorgeous aluminum twin-spar frame, triple disc brakes, and a whole host of lightweight, mass-centralizing tricks you’d normally expect to find on bikes with a much larger displacement. The NSR250 was motivated by a liquid-cooled two-stroke v-twin with two carburetors and Honda’s ATAC “automatic torque…
Growing up, my only experience with two-strokes was in leaf blowers: I didn’t ride dirt bikes, and two-stroke sportbikes were long gone by the time I got into motorcycles. A thudding v-twin sounds like sex, and the technology that allows a four to scream to 16,000rpm boggles my mind while the noise makes my hair…
Update 8.1.2016: The seller has notified us that this bike has sold. Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc V4-powered sports motorcycles are all the rage now, but they were long associated with just one manufacturer: Honda. Their homologation RC30 set the standard for “exotic” in the late 1980s and 1990s: V4, gear-driven cams, single-sided swingarms…
I’m really shocked there are any Honda Hawk GTs running around still so few miles on them at this point. After all, that’s kind of why you generally buy a Honda, right? So you can ride the hell out of it, without worrying about failing voltage regulators, expensive and frequent valve-adjustments, expensive parts… The bike…
With the other manufacturers building their exotic turbocharged 80s confections around more sophisticated four-cylinder designs, why did Honda base their CX650 Turbo on a bike that was so ugly, the British press dubbed it the “plastic maggot”? Well even though a simple, pushrod v-twin seems to go against the high-tech theme these motorcycles embodied, the…
Update 6.1.2016: Sold in just one week! Congratulations to buyer and seller! -dc If Honda’s history of brilliant technical innovation has a downside, it’s that it sometimes posits answers to questions no one actually asked. Some recent missteps like their sophisticated but overweight and expensive VFR sport-tourer suggest that they’ve just recently lost their way.…
Grey Market Week continues with another weird and wonderful small-displacement sportbike from Honda, the CBR250RR. At a glance, it might be easy to dismiss this little 250 as a primitive commuter like the current CBR300, since these days, that’s exactly what you’ll get. The CBR, Ninja 300, R3 are all clearly built as budget-friendly…
Although small-displacement two-stroke sportbikes like this Honda NSR250R have been finding their way over to the US in shipping containers and across the border from Canada for a while now, they’re still relatively rare here and can be difficult to register for road use. This one is titled in Washington State, so that should help…
