CBX Racing

[Syscrush]

I've said it before, I'll say it again:

I am begging you to work with a good documentary short maker who can get good footage (and audio) of you riding that bike at the track. I would think that Petrolicious would have to love your personal story and the bike:

https://www.youtube.com/@Petrolicious

[Warwick Biggs]

OK Phil, just for you. Fran's nephew Angus is a professional TV cameraman who regularly films motor racing in Oz.

He has agreed and my club has also agreed to devote a day to making a short film on the Lump in my workshop and at the track. At the moment we are experiencing record low temperatures from an icy Antarctic blast so it will be a matter of finding a time for Angus that doesn't clash with his or the track commitments and suitable weather. My club President has even volunteered his F4 MV Agusta as a camera mule so hopefully we will be able to upload some sound and vision of the Lump in action to the ICOA website.

[Syscrush]

YUSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!

I'm so looking forward to it. I hope it'll be a fun experience for you, Rick.

[steve murdoch icoa #5322]

So looking forward to the track footage Rick and nice to hear the track and Club are on board.

Well done Phil with your powers of persuasion!

[NobleHops]

That would be amazing, Rick. Hope it all comes together.

[Warwick Biggs]

This might take a little while fellas. We are in the depths of winter here and while today is a sunny 17 and I was able to do a quick scoot out to the track to check out the volunteers currently re-furbishing the Club's commercial kitchen it is hard to predict good days for filming well in advance.

I went for a run up thru' Australia Felix on my VFR800 a few days ago with a couple of mates and what started out as a crisp sunny morning with a dry forecast quickly deteriorated into showers of rain and towards the end of the day, patches of ice combined with suicidal macropods. After around 600 klms I was completely knackered and freezing by the time I got home.

When there are a number of people involved and the cameraman is 400 klms away in Adelaide it helps to know what the weather will do well in advance and that is tricky at this time of year. Unlike me, Angus still has to work for a living too, so that is another constraint.

I had been planning to pull the cast iron liners out of the barrels and have them nikasealed; just waiting 'till the motor comes out again but today I learnt that the last guy doing this up in Queensland is retiring which is inconvenient.

[80 cbx dude #6216]

I also would like to see and hear a video!

[Devonian]

Well, I have spent an inordinate amount of time, over the last few days, reading this entire thread. I really don't know what to say. It has been quite a ride. Following along with this story, over nine years, has been fun and exciting. My hat goes off to you Warwick. You started this whole thing at about the age I am now, and your perseverance and determination is a great inspiration. Along the way, I have learned a lot about the CBX, racing history, and Australian politics, as well as just some fun and interesting tales. I look forward to the video.

[Warwick Biggs]

I'm glad some people find this trip interesting. Speaking for myself it has had it's ups and downs and was simply my way of coming to grips with life after a stroke. I'm not sure it was a very sensible response but this site helped me a lot, both with the bike and overcoming my physical disability.

In reality I find myself shocked and rather alarmed to reach the age of 72. I never ever imagined life after 30 much less growing old but so long as I can get my arthritic paws around a throttle I can forget about all that and the CBX has one of the most satisfying to twist, despite it's age. Taking nearly a decade to come to grips with it has been something of a reality check but that says more about me and my shortcomings both as a rider and as a fettler. I hesitate to call myself a mechanic because I'm just a motorcyclist.

I've had the opportunity to ride and own a lot of different bikes over a lifetime of motorcycling in many different countries and I can honestly say the big six remains one of my favourite rides. I only wish I had the time and ability to sort out all it's pecadillos because in my mind's eye I have a thoroughly modern CBX. Lighter, and a bit smaller but with all the addictive character of the original.

Honda seems keen on 5's these days and I still haven't ridden one of them so, until I can swing a leg over a thoroughly modern CBX (or a 5) I will just have to make do fiddling with my 42 year old bete noir, even if I have to put a younger and faster rider on it to keep the wheels turning.

[Devonian]

If you could get your hands on a Honda 5 cylinder bike, that would be special indeed. They were full-on motogp bikes only. Not aware of anything more recent.

[Warwick Biggs]

That is Honda's current problem. They have struggled to recover from the GFC and Covid. In Oz Honda has just released the long overdue new CB600 RR but it is nearly $30K on the road (actually imo it should just be marketed as a track bike saving thousands) but a 2017 600 that I can pick up as a track bike for $5K is just about as quick. Honda is not alone. The m/c market is wildly inflated. And how long since any of the Japanese manufacturers have connected their MotoGP bikes to the average consumer? Have they forgotten how they managed their own relatively recent rise? BMW can do it. KTM can do it. Even Ducati are doing it but the land of the rising sun seems to be strangely somnolent.

When I was young and everybody I knew rode a bike you could buy a good new bike for a month's laboring work. In those days they were Pommy bikes, shortly to be overtaken by Jap bikes as the UK industry crashed and burned. But China is about to cream the Japanese industry, funded to a certain extent by short sighted European manufacturers.

China has it's own problems too but when I look at where our future bikes will be coming from it is not Japan or Europe, it is China.

[Dynamohum]

IMG_0946.png

Have you seen China’s answer to the Goldwing? US price is supposed to be $48,000 and they’ve added a couple cylinders.

[Warwick Biggs]

A joke, surely?

Some years ago I was up in Queensland in the hilly Gold Coast hinterland riding an XJ900. I observed a group of half a dozen riders on heavy cruisers turn off the road I was on and scoot up a steep driveway to a restaurant. The lead rider stopped halfway up for some reason and I watched as one by one they each lost control and dropped their heavy bikes. As they did so the bikes started to slide back down the hill piling up in a fractured mess at the bottom.

Oh dear! I don't normally take pleasure in other motorcyclist's misfortunes but I could not help laughing out loud. It was a classic case of bikes that were just too big and heavy for their riders and the way they fell off one after the other could never have been choreographed. Bigger is not always better altho' I hasten to add that I reckon Goldwings are great for covering long distances in a modicum of comfort. A flat 8 mc however, is overkill imo.

These days I have enuf' trouble getting my VFR800 onto it's centreststand. With a full tank, it weighs significantly more than the CBX.

[Warwick Biggs]

Here is a link to my Club's Facebook page and if you scroll down to February earlier this year you can see some good footage of TT winner Davo Johnson doing some hot laps at Mac Park. OK, so its' not a CBX, I know but just a little teaser while I get myself organised:-

https://www.facebook.com/macparkmotorcycleclub/

[Warwick Biggs]

Just a word to let you know that we haven't been blown away by winter gales... yet.

Between squalls we managed 3 sessions at the track yesterday. The CBX remains under a cover awaiting spring (hey, today is the first day of spring here but you wouldn't know it... grey, cold and a force 5 gale blowing off the Southern Ocean). The Lump does get started regularly tho'. Took the Vitpilen to the track after pushing forks up nearly half a metre in the TC's. Radical? Yep.

It has a weird front-end geometry with chopperesq' rake and trail in the chromalloy frame and 135mm of travel but much stiffer springs in it now. So short of decapitating the head (as we did on the Prolink) radical measures are necessary to get heat into the front tyre. Running mid 20's pressure on slicks in the wet is tricky but thankfully it dried b4 lunch, albeit the wind was a problem in places.

By the last session we were passing most of the field using the world superbike spec brakes to close and the instant corner exit grunt to surge past. Easy peasey. We had some fun, albeit having to knock the forks down 150 mm to stop the front tyre chewing thru' the radiator. Even with the compression wound on close to the max on the White Power forks the close to 1.3g braking force is putting over a ton of pressure on the front end meaning all that 135 mm's of travel was still there. Next job is to shorten the cartridges to limit that excessive travel. But if you want to have some serious fun at the track, find a 701 Husqvarna Vitpilen. Yes, it's the polar opposite to a CBX but almost as much fun, especially for us old guys (my lh ankle remains fairly sore from the highside and then getting run over - 'chronic' say the medicos, more champagne say I).