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Born in 1993, it took It took four years
for the successor to the legendary RC30
to win the World Superbike champion-
ship, but on the eve of Honda’s 50th
birthday, American John Kocinski deliv-
ered the prize the company’s founder
Soichiro Honda coveted above all oth-
ers on two wheels: the top honor in
4-stroke racing for a company whose
corporate and sporting success over theprevious half-century had until recently
been based on ever more sophisti-
cated 4-strokes. To do this in 1997, the
company’s engineers produced a virtual
4-stroke GP bike that revved to nearly
15,000rpm.
It was a sweet triumph for Honda,
whose previous World Superbike titles
had been won a decade earlier in 1988
and 1989, courtesy of Fred Merkel and
the Team Rumi RC30. Honda then
sat out the Superbike class at world
level for three years at the start of the
decade, while they worked on their
next-generation successor to the RC30.
But throughout this time they contin-
ued to win Suzuka 8 Hours endurance
races run to TT Formula 1 rules on the
RVF750, which allowed full-on 4-strokeracers with essentially just the engine
castings derived from a street bike.
The absence from contention as the
Superbike class attained significant
World status must have been acutely
frustrating to Honda management, in
commercial as well as sporting terms.
To make matters worse, the RC45 was
at least a year late when it appeared at
the end of 1993.
The new bike had a troubled debut
season, although Aaron Slight’s eight
second places in 1994 without ever
quite achieving a race victory, showed
it could be a contender. It suffered
handling problems exacerbated in 1995
by a swap from Dunlop to Michelin
tires. But, in typical Honda fashion,
dedicated work by its army of engineersH
Honda’s V4-engined RC45 had
a difficult birth, at a time when
Superbikes were challenging500GP lap records.
Story by Alan Cathcart
Photos by Kel Edge