My trip to the Honda 50th anniversary press junket began with a week's prior notice and some words from Mr. Editor Ulrich: By Sam Fleming
My trip to the Honda 50th anniversary press junket began with a week's prior notice and some words from Mr. Editor Ulrich:
"Dress nicely. Business clothes, nothing offensive."
Big suitcase, no problem.
"Don't start yelling 'A-Bomb' in the train stations."
Uh, okay, I think I can refrain.
"Be polite with the Japanese; don't ask their wives to blow you."
What the hell is he talking about? "Uh, John? Ummm, are these all things that arose as problems with other reporters in Japan?"
"I can neither confirm nor deny that statement--but I figure it can't hurt to bring it up. And don't tell them you race a Suzuki."
Thus with these sage words of advice from the experienced editor I find myself in the exclusive All Nippon Airline lounge sipping complimentary cappuccino and gazing upon a double decker 747. A quick glance at the plane ticket which had arrived courtesy HoMoCo three days earlier suggested that I was not flying cattle class over Alaska but that I had sold myself for $5500. I better drink a few more of those free espressos. It is 10:00 a.m. and while my brain throbs for caffeine many of the Japanese in the lounge are drinking Heineken. It is unclear whether their motivation for sedatives comes from the latest Nikkei Index drop or that it is already midnight tomorrow in Japan.
Fortunately, I am going to Japan under the philosophy of product placement, not product introduction. Long ago some clever advertiser figured out that the public was becoming too cynical about advertising and that more objective-sounding mentions of their products needed to occur. The first big campaign I know of was launched by an advertising firm on the behalf of the diamond cartel. At the turn of the century, diamonds went from being a rare gem to being a semi-precious oddity mined by the tons. In order to keep the price of diamonds from plummeting, strict controls were placed on the supply released to the public. A very expensive advertising campaign was launched to start a tradition of diamond wedding rings in the U.S. with the suggested notion that the bigger the price tag, the deeper the love. Money was paid to social editors all across the country to start mentioning the price tag (or carat size) of the diamonds in wedding notices and movies (go ahead, name a few) began to pop up with diamond themes. Complete this sentence: "Diamonds are_________." See, it has worked. Anyone remember the ad on TV where the South Africans tried to convince us that we should spend two month's salary on a piece of carbon as an act of responsibility rather than buy a motorcycle? Fight the power.
However, now that I am reaping the bounty of this sort of thing, I feel utterly and regretlessly co-opted. I will become a willing mouthpiece for HoMoCo as long as they keep this preferential treatment coming. Fortunately for my hearing, the angel and devil on my shoulder won't have to yell too much or too loud since I will not actually have to ride, review or revile any product of Honda. I only have to go to their party and parade and mention their name a lot in this article for them to be happy. As long as they don't check the ad rates in RW and realize they could have bought half the issue to run a biography of Soichiro instead of paying for me to junket, everything is copacetic.
The flight from Dulles International outside DC to Narita outside Tokyo took 13.5 hours, during which I lost a day (I think I dropped it somewhere over the Bering Sea). Once I cleared the barriers into the country (which is not unlike trying to get into Daytona) I was whisked away by Nissan Limousine for a three-hour drive to Utsunomiya. We did get to drive through Tokyo during rush hours, where I saw the locals on, surprisingly, large-displacement sportbikes lane-splitting in such a fearless manner that it would have put the Italians to shame.
Eventually, I passed out in the back of the car, which arrived at 6:00 p.m. at our hotel. Entering the lobby, I walked into the midst of the most well-dressed group of young people to which I have ever borne witness. Feeling boorish and hopelessly Gaijin (the Japanese term for "foreign people") I slunk across the lobby and into the relative safety of my tidy, and tiny, Japanese hotel room--where the lights are turned on by placing the weighty key chain on a special dish on the wall and the shower has a thermostat. Later I found the excruciatingly stylish and neat dress was for a wedding party and that not all Nipponese paid such close attention to matching their socks and tie.
I slept for 12 hours and, after liberally dosing myself with chocolate-covered espresso beans, ventured into the world of moto-junkets.
We were transported by bus on the two-hour drive via, by American standards, tiny back roads, to Honda's Twin Ring Motegi racetrack. My esteemed associates and I agreed that it was the most well-appointed, finest-facilitied, well-laid-out track any of us had ever seen in the world. Unlike the American motorsports parks, the road course does not use one iota of the oval, and, therefore, has no harsh pavement transitions and very few places where walls are located in what should be the run-off zone. The place is so lavish that the cost/benefit analysis must have had some really weird entries like "Benefit: Showing the world how it should be done--$70,000,000" or something like that.
Apparently the Honda 50th Anniversary Grand Parade will be the event with the most attendance in the track's limited history. The invitation-only event (according to Honda's Wakako Sato) would have drawn 270,000 people if it had not been limited to 50,000. Since the tickets were gratis this was to be Honda's treat for all of us.
My usual attitude is one of loving motorcycling but having a great deal of ambivalence towards the machines themselves. Having dabbled in brand loyalty, market sectoring (I am a touring rider, I am a racer, I am a commuter, I am a sport rider) and the usual shiny alloy fetishism I eventually became resigned to the philosophy that motorcycles are just appliances similar to refrigerators and computers. Any other importance is simply the creation of the beholder's mind and the manufacturers' wily attempts to replace innovation and value with brand loyalty.
I clung to this as two technicians bumped-started a 1966 six-cylinder 250 to life in the stillness of the morning. It sounded like no other motorcycle on earth. It didn't howl, it shrieked. Although I have no nostalgia for old racebikes (I barely have feelings for new racebikes) I felt my adolescent self awaken and the infatuation I felt for my first ride (a Honda CL175) swell in my throat.
"Must...not...let...Honda...appropriate...love...of...motorcycles."
I put in earplugs and went to check out the promenade.
Walking the vendor row demonstrated that some things have worldwide appeal to gear heads:
Shiny aluminum.
Women in skimpy outfits.
Beer.
Greasy and/or grilled meat.
The Motegi vendor's row upped the ante over such gatherings in the U.S.. Although I am not a regular attendant at rallies or swap meets, my limited exposure does suggest that a box of titanium connecting rods is a bit unusual, as is a table covered in flatslides or a rack of magnesium wheels. Other items that caught my eye were the many NR750s running around the place, including a number which were treated with such disdain by their owners that they were dirty. Not dirty in that "rode to the track in the rain" way but dirty in the "wash once a year whether it needs it or not" kind of way.
While contemplating the Honda souvenir cheesecake display I was approached by Adam, a Brit who has lived in Japan for seven years teaching English and riding a VFR750. He filled me in on the local scene. Disposable income is veritably incinerated in the pursuit of ownership of the trickest ride around. On Sundays the rest areas between Tokyo and Kawasaki fill with hundreds of bikes including multiple examples of every model of Bimota. NR750s? "A dime a dozen, mate. The locals go to Ueno (the world famous bike district of Tokyo) and bag an R1 on Thursday, get the Technomags mounted Friday, pick out their new leathers on Saturday and head for Mt. Fuji (continuing south past Kawasaki from Tokyo) on Sunday. Some of them can ride, but there are plenty of bunches of flowers in the turns for the ones who couldn't. The speed limit is 80 kph (50 mph) but it is pretty much ignored. I've been pulled over at 240 kph (149 mph) and the cops smiled and let me go once they saw I was Gaijin. The roads around Mt. Fuji are billiard-table smooth and brilliantly curvy. Rent a 916 in Ueno and come with us this Sunday. The only drag is the no-pillions-on-the-highway law. They passed it to discourage the Bosozoku who like to ride around with the passenger carrying a bat or something." Unfortunately, my flight home was firmly on Friday so I will have to schedule strafing Mt. Fuji on a rented 916 for the next trip to Nippon.
I was unable to understand the calls of the many food vendors beckoning me to their smoking stalls so I walked through the undertrack tunnel to the pits and the welcoming Media Tent. I dined with approximately 500 media representatives but of this number there were only a handful of other gringos besides the ones from America.
I took the opportunity of this casual luncheon setting to ingratiate myself with Honda folks on the off chance that it may result in another bizarre cost/benefit study which determines that it will be in the company's best interest to spend $10,000 to squire me around Japan for a couple days. (I need 40 of you dear readers to go purchase F4s and then write and tell Honda that you were going to buy R6s but that this, and only this, article changed your minds.) My impression of those conversations follows:
Honda is a pure motor company (no pianos or ships). Although BMW doesn't make lawn mowers or snow blowers I could not think of another major company which only produced cars and bikes. As I have a penchant for underdogs I have actually always rooted against Honda in any sort of motor racing because it seemed to me like they always won anything they wanted. What I was never aware of was that, for many years, Honda was the underdog, both in the closed circle of Japanese industrialists and Japanese society. Soichiro Honda had a reputation for being a hard-drinking (even for the Japanese), womanizing rogue who was a bit of a red-headed stepchild to a black-haired country. Without getting too clinical about it (I loathe psychologists) it is not too difficult to see the roots of the motivation which drove the man, via the company which bears his name, to prove to the university that he was nothing at which to be laughed.
Although Honda's car operations overwhelm the bikes in North America, Honda was originally started as a motorcycle company and, worldwide, bikes are still terribly important to the company's ample bottom line. There might not be much margin in each step-thru but if you sell a couple of million of them in some developing market there doesn't have to be. Honda also sees national racing as important to selling streetbikes but, as far as privateer road racing goes, don't hold your breath for contingency money.
The automotive side is planning on trying to use the bikes to make the cars more interesting compared to, say, Toyota. BMW tries this tack with regards to Mercedes as in "We also make bikes, they also make trucks".
A short walk from the press tent through the under-track tunnel led me to my excellent seat for the Grand Parade. There were lines of shrouded vehicles parked with cars on the left and bikes on the right. The parade began with production vehicles but production cars and old motorized bicycles don't really do much for me. This allowed me to retain my status of jaded moto-enthusiast. The skydivers were a nice touch, the rocket was a little confusing to those of us who could not understand a word of the commentary and the walking robots demonstrated that Honda could succeed where all other attempting institutions, public or private, have failed.
Then they started firing up the old racebikes.
My heart jumped at the cacophony. I didn't know the bikes by sight since my interest in motorcycles only began in 1983 but they fired up a row of about 10 vintage racers from the 1960s. These bikes were pulled out of the on-premises Honda museum, tuned up, tired and fired. The small Fours sounded great but the 250cc Six was pure sex. It had a high-pitched rip of fine linen that soared over the other blipping throttles. Riders lined up and began to take laps around the oval track so we could see and hear these pieces in action. I used to go to transport museums and think "but do they run?" These ran. And were actually run pretty hard.
The second group of bikes included some that I could remember. Freddie Spencer's NSR500 complete with Freddie himself and a slew of CB and RVF endurance bikes, all of which were wheelied onto the track, then thrashed for a few laps. Truthfully, although my heart sang for the bikes, they were out of their element on the oval and seemed awfully small and insignificant. Jewels don't look great from the cheap seats but I could enjoy the car display guilt-free knowing that I would get to see the bikes up close at the day's end.
I know nothing about racecars, the class structures or the drivers. I do know that, although production street cars are pretty dull all around (including the sporty ones), the open-wheeled racers rolled out for the parade were pretty astounding. Examples included a 1500cc twin-turbo motor capable of producing 1200 bhp in qualifying trim and a 3500cc V-12 capable of turning very large and very sticky tires to smoke and powder, as one obliging driver demonstrated for us. A display of the racer's skill, and audacity, was performed as a museum piece of an F-1 car was spun in circles between two concrete walls, bringing the crowd cheering to its feet.
I missed out on the last few minutes of the ceremony as I wanted to get down through the access tunnel and start exploiting my press credentials to get a good look at the machinery. Up close the bikes returned to their usual luster. Unlike concourse examples these were the actual bikes raced in their day. Although clean, they had the scored fasteners, paint scratches and scarred levers of bikes you would see in any paddock. Somehow the flaws and crash damage made the bikes more interesting to me. Not to get too hokey here but an expensive rare machine is an expensive rare machine but one with a scored brake lever tells a tale of human frailty, uh, or something.
As the sun set I used my press pass, my gaijin ignorance and my teammate's theory of "If you don't ask they can't say no" to get onto the roof of the infield control tower. Watching the thinning crowd inspecting the cars and bikes I tried, with jet-lagged brain, to put this event into some sort of greater context. A motor company wants to throw itself a self-congratulatory party where it displays its engineering prowess to all assembled. Neat bikes and cars I thought--but so what? Lots of companies could do that by showing their World Championship-winning F-1 and F-2 cars as well as their Championship-winning GP bikes, endurance bikes and, if they had cared to, World Superbikes, couldn't they? Well, no. No one else could. On a cold, still night in Rhineland one can hear engineers crying themselves to sleep wishing they had the prowess of their Honda counterparts.
So no other company has ever been as successful at motor racing? Does that make Honda the greatest motor company on earth? As the moon rose and I made my way down the stairs past the bowing security guards I reached an obvious conclusion:
Yes. Yes it does.
