The Honda CB750: How One Motorcycle Invented the Superbike

In the spring of 1969, big motorcycles still ran on drum brakes, kickstarters and a fair amount of faith. British twins ruled the top end of the market, American V-twins thundered along their own separate path, and real speed usually came bundled with oil leaks, vibration and electrics that quit without warning. Then Honda showed up with a 736cc inline four that had a front disc brake and an electric starter, and it outran, outbraked and outsold nearly everything else on the road. Dealers didn’t have a word for it. Motorcycle journalists did, within a few months: the superbike.

The World Before the CB750

Fast motorcycles existed before 1969, but they came with conditions attached. The Vincent Black Shadow had claimed the title of world’s fastest production motorcycle back in 1948, with a top speed of around 125 mph (201 km/h), yet Vincent built fewer than 1,800 of them across seven years. Getting one meant paying a premium and waiting, since the company that built them could barely keep pace with its own orders.

Everyone else’s big bikes carried their own compromises. Triumph, BSA and Norton built desirable motorcycles with real character, but oil leaks, vibration from rigid engine mounts and unreliable electrics were common complaints. Harley-Davidson’s Shovelhead, introduced in 1966, brought its own share of headaches too. Drum brakes and kickstarters remained standard across the board. A bike that started every time and didn’t leak was still the exception, not the rule.

Why Honda Bet on a Bigger Machine

 

Honda’s road to the CB750 started on the racetrack, or rather, where Honda decided to leave it. In 1967, after five consecutive years winning the 350cc Grand Prix World Championship and sweeping the 250cc class, Honda withdrew from Grand Prix racing. New FIM rules restricting engine configurations had made further development pointless. So Honda walked away and redirected that racing budget and engineering talent toward the street.

The obvious target was the United States, where Honda’s sales had softened and dealers wanted a bigger motorcycle to compete with British and American iron. Project leader Yoshiro Harada traveled to the US in the summer of 1967 to study how the smaller CB450 was landing with buyers. He came back convinced Honda could build something bigger, and told American Honda staff that the CB450 already outperformed comparable Norton and Triumph models. A bigger bike, he argued, would sell itself.

Building the First Superbike

Honda didn’t hold back on the spec sheet. The CB750’s engineering combined several firsts: a 736cc air-cooled inline four with a single overhead camshaft, paired with a five-speed gearbox and chain final drive, wrapped in four individual exhaust pipes that became the bike’s visual signature. It was the first mass-production motorcycle to combine four cylinders, a front disc brake and an electric starter in one package, features that had mostly been confined to racing machines or expensive, hand-built prototypes.

The performance numbers backed up the engineering. Honda claimed around 67 horsepower (50 kW) at 8,500 rpm, a top speed near 125 mph (201 km/h), and a quarter-mile time of roughly 13.4 seconds. That last figure is the one that stings a little: it would have beaten a brand new Lamborghini Miura P400S off the line that same year. At $1,495, the CB750 undercut a comparable Triumph by a wide margin while outmuscling a 1,300cc Harley-Davidson. Riders finally got racetrack engineering they could actually afford.

The Disc Brake Gamble

The front disc brake very nearly didn’t happen. Honda’s engineers pushed hard for it over objections from colleagues who worried it would be noisy, expensive to produce and difficult to service. Drum brakes were the industry standard, and no manufacturer had fitted a disc brake to a mass-production motorcycle before. But Honda’s team held their ground, and the wager paid off. Within a few years, front discs were the expectation on any serious motorcycle. The drum brake started its slow exit from the front wheel of performance bikes.

A Demand Honda Didn’t See Coming

The CB750 made its public debut at the Tokyo Motor Show in November 1968, then crossed to Britain for the Brighton motorcycle show the following April. Reaction on both sides of the world was immediate. Here was a Japanese manufacturer, from a country not yet associated with premium engineering, outperforming British and American rivals on their own turf.

What happened next caught even Honda off guard. The company had planned for modest volume, projecting around 1,500 units a year and building the early engines using a sandcast method rather than investing in expensive die-cast tooling for an unproven model.

Orders poured in regardless. Honda revised its production target first to 1,500 a month, then to 3,000 a month, scrambling to keep pace with a market it had badly underestimated.

The Sandcast Originals

Those early sandcast engines are now the most sought-after CB750s in the collector market. They’re identifiable by a rougher finish on the engine cases and a clutch cover held on by ten screws instead of eleven on later models. One pre-production example from 1968 sold at auction for more than $260,000, over 170 times its original sticker price. What started as a cost-saving shortcut is now the most collectible detail on the whole bike.

The Bike That Ended an Era

The British motorcycle industry never fully recovered from the CB750’s arrival. Triumph, BSA and Norton had spent decades building loyal followings on performance and character, but character alone couldn’t compete with a bike that started every time, leaked nothing and cost less. Within a decade, most of the storied British marques had collapsed or been absorbed into smaller operations, unable to match Japanese manufacturing quality at a comparable price.

Honda’s rivals in Japan took notice immediately. Kawasaki had been developing its own secret 750cc four when the CB750 appeared. The project got scrapped on the spot, and Kawasaki’s engineers went back to their drawing boards, returning in 1972 with the larger 903cc Z1. Suzuki followed with the GS series, and the transverse four-cylinder layout became so common across Japanese manufacturers that riders started calling these bikes UJMs, short for Universal Japanese Motorcycle. Honda had set a template that the rest of the industry spent the next decade copying.

The CB750 stayed in production for roughly a decade, with more than 400,000 units built and steady updates along the way, before handing the torch to later CB and CBR models that still trace their engineering back to 1969. The word superbike stuck around too, eventually applied to everything from the Kawasaki Z1 to today’s liter-class sportbikes. None of them would carry that name if a Honda engineering team hadn’t decided, more than fifty years ago, that a fast motorcycle didn’t have to be fragile, exclusive or hard to live with.