VOL. 55 ISSUE 29 JULY 24, 2018 P95
A
fter six years, the motorcycle Honda
created in the late '80s to win the
WorldSBK Championship—with which
they succeeded in 1988 and 1989—the Hon-
da RC30, was getting a bit long in the tooth.
By 1994, something more was needed
to stay with the likes of the Ducati 916, the
Kawasaki ZX-7R, and soon, the Suzuki
GSX-R750.
That something was the glorious RC45,
an evolution of the RVF750 factory racer
that saw occasional duty in races like the
Suzuka 8 Hour in the hands of factory-only
racers like Mick Doohan and Daryl Beattie.
Honda built just enough RC45s (200
of them) in the 1994 production year—and
only in the 1994 production year—to qualify
for WorldSBK, and over the next five years,
a handful more trickled out to keep Honda-
backed teams around the world supplied.
It took until 1997 for John Kocinski to
achieve the Honda factory's aim of wrestling
the WorldSBK Championship from Ducati,
but the RC45 made a winning debut three
years earlier at the 1994 Isle of Man TT,
when Steve Hislop, Phillip McCallen and
Joey Dunlop gave the works-supplied UK
Castrol Honda team a resounding clean
sweep of the podium in the Formula One
TT, followed later in the week by an identi-
cal result in the Senior TT. Indeed, with the
only works squad in the event, Honda UK
and the Castrol RC45s would dominate the
TT for the next five years.
Miguel Duhamel took the 1995 AMA
Superbike Championship and the 1996
Daytona 200 on the RC45; Ben Bostrom
took the 1998 AMA Superbike title on the
While its rivals stuck with the near-ubiquitous in-line DOHC four-
cylinder engine, Honda had a long-term investment in the V4 layout,
and refused to submit. But it came at a cost—a big cost.
RENNIE SCAYSBROOK /PHOTOGRAPHY BY KIT PALMER/VIDEO BY JORDAN POWELL
