Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

~~ Exclusive: Honda NR500 piston revealed ~ Yes, Virginia, there really is an oblong, eight-valve, twin-rod piston By Dennis Noyes The piston you see is real. Honda personnel in Italy, England and Japan have acknowledged that . .. "Yes, it is one of ours." But once the piston was measured and a few basic calculations were made, it became obvious that this piston was not from the NR500 V-4 with 36mm or 40mm stroke that Honda had previously announced. Since all GP machines must declare stroke and have said stroke inscribed on the crankcases when they report for noise testing, we know that Honda's NR500 never raced with a stroke shorter than 36mm and that later versions had a 40mm stroke. The piston you see here used with a 36mm stroke would give us a four cylinder engine of 742cc. With a 40mm stroke we are talking about an 824cc N R. If this piston is to be used in a legal 500cc GP road racer we have to use a freakishly short 24mm stroke in conjunction with a theoretical (if the oblong piston were round) 8Imm bore. Did Honda run an oversize motor~ Is this in fact a piston from an experimental 750cc or 850cc engine~ A II we really know, if we believe, is that Honda either released or misplaced a genuine NR eight-valve, oblong piston and that somewhere within Honda R&D they are still tinkering with the NR, dubbed the "Never Ready" by the European press. . In A merica, the Honda N R ridden by Freddie Spencer managed a face-saving heat win at Laguna Sua in front of Roberts and Mamola on the works Yamaha and Suzuki (before blowing up in the final), but in Europe the NR has generally been regarded as an unmitigated fiasco. Here, Dennis Noyes of Solo Moto, the Spanish newspaper that shared the exclusive photos of the NR piston with Italy's Moto Sprint and Cycle News, recalls the brief and joyless history of the NR to date and speculates on the true nature of the NR which Honda seems determined to eventually develop inJo a winner. Nothing fails like failure, and when it became clear that the Honda NR500 wasn't going to be winning any races in 1979, the European press which had been splashing the NR over its .covers all winter, lost all interest in the red white and blue four, . stroke road race machme. The high-revving four-strokes .. 9 withtwobanksofoblongpi.stonsse~at 3.... ~1lI!~.~i.theightvalves~cylm- der .and eight flat slide carbs, cloc~ redhned at 20,~ rpm, made th~u debut at the Bnllsh GP of 1979, WIth Takazumi Katayama and Mick Grant at the controls. The bu~ld-up to this H!>nda re~urn to GP raof!g had been gomgon smce the first photos of the NR were released by Honda at the Isle of Man in 1978. The NR instantly became the Great White Hope for four-stroke lovers (twostroke haters) round the world. Serious racing engineers also awaited developments, but the press played up the nostalgic angle. The second coming is at handl Honda cranked out a new slogan which fed the flames: "Honda enters, Honda wins." And Honda also leaked information in dribbles and spurts and managed to get more attention devoted to the as-yet unseen NR than was given to Kenny Roberts' Yamaha and the ultracompetitive Suzukis of Sheene and Hartog. During the winter of 1978/79, jui<;y tidbits of Honda poop from "usually reliable sources" glutted the market. "If you quote me on this I'll deny it," said my Italian source the day he told me for the first tfme of "oval piston~." "I can tell you in the strictest confidence," said the British photographer just hack from Honda, "that the NR is making 120 horsepower at 21,000 rpm, and that they are out to win at Silverstone-" A well-known German writer managed to get a look at the Honda in bits on the bench in Japan and jumped toa stanling conclusion which hit the headlines: "Honda NR is a V-81" And since the FIM limits 500s to four cylinders, Honda was forced to explain that the NR was a four but that there were eight rods, two per oval piston. This was all great stuff. An official press release said that the NR was in fact a IllO-degree V-4, eight valves per cylinder with oval pistons ... ceramic pistons, matel No horsepower figures were mentioned, but mention of over 20,000 rpm was made. Like the Washirtgton Sena~.fan sitting on the bench at midnight in the opening scene of Damn Yankees, I,. like a lot of other two-stroke haters, would have entered into negotiations with the Devil himself if only such heady stuff could be true. Let it be true I The roar o£ the MV Agusta had faded in 1975 when Agostini on the Yamaha just beat Phil Read on the MV fire engine. It was Ago himself who did penitence in 1976 with a swan song MV Agusta victory in front o£ the Suzukis of Marco Lucchinelli and Pat Hennen at West Germany's N urburgring, but the MV boxer watercooled four was not to be. FIM noise regulations, shaky MV Agusta fortunes and the cruel realities (fast two-strokes, for example) sent the roaring MV out to pasture, doomed to pre-race parade duty. If you ever heard two MV's howling in anger at the head of a pack of screaming two-strokes and if your heart is not made of stone, you know what MV and "The Big Noise" meant to all of us in Europe. The roar o£ the MV's in the warm-up area gave meaning to the word visceral. It hit you at gut level. It sounded like a motorcycle! So when the MV's were gone you either cried in your beer and said, to quote an Ipswich sidecar racer, "Well, that's the way things are when they're like that," or you became a True Believer. Save your Castrol R, boys, the four-strokes are gonna rise againl It was the belief in the legend of the Once and Future King, the Great Four· Stroke in the Sky that would return to avenge unspeakable outrages ... it was all that sweet nostalgia that made so many people believe in a Honda with oval ceramic pistons and more valves than a grid of Manx Nortons. I wanted to believe, but during the winter of 1978/791 spoke to two sages who didn't think the NR had the chance of a snowball in hell. Vic Willoughby, the well-known British lechnical journalist said, "It won't breathe at those revs with poppet valves," and then went on to extol the merits of Aspen valves. But it was Ducati's Fabio Taglioni who crushed my hopes. In his Bargo Panigale office with the old Apollo V-4 engine as a doorstop and the plans o£ the new V-4 Pantah on his desk, Dr. T. said, "Too many valves to keep high compression at such high revs. It won't work." As the racing season grew near the expectation rose, but when the NR finally appeared at Silverstone, Honda· was already making whiney noises. "This is only the beginning of a long development program. We musm't have unrealistic expectations." And, the noise on the track, due mainly to the F1M 110 decibel limits, was all buzz and no thump. A lot 9f air was being pumped through those V·4 motors but not much power was getting to the road. A friend of mine named Toni Garcia, riding a tatty and not-too-swift over-the-counter Yamaha passed both the factory Hondas on the Hanger Straight and told me in succinct Spanish what I feared, "It's slower than a dead fat man." Toni was first reserve with a time just a click better than Grant. Katayama was last man on the grid, but Honda G.B. had more pull than Antonio . Garcia Moreno and when a slot opened due to a last-practice crash it was Grant and the NR who were given the start. As it turned out, I'm sure Grant would have preferred to have watched from the pit wall. When the lights went green and the grid cleared off, Katayama and Grant were left still shoving. A bike that ~!tes maximum P9~ at _af!>und

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