I must have been a very good boy recently. Remembered to put fuel in my better half’s car. Avoided loading the dishwasher in that way that makes my normally mild-mannered beloved turn inexplicably into a knot of cold fury. For she has rewarded me by giving me the keys to her beloved and much pampered motorcycle, to take it out for a post-winter hibernation blast.
We are an inclusive church here at The Intercooler, so we like to throw in a two-wheeled hero from time to time. But it’s not just to lob in a token bike story that I have carefully accumulated enough brownie points to blag, and hence write about, this extraordinary machine. I think its story might be of relevance even to those of you who have no interest in anything that has fewer than four wheels. Because it could just bring a glimmer of hope to those of us who yearn for a new approach to sports cars.
But first, what exactly is it? Bike companies like to name their products using an indecipherable series of letters and numbers which mean very little to those of us who don’t keep up with the bike world. So this is, officially, a Honda CBR900RR-N – the SC28 model, for the Honda geeks out there. More familiarly, it will always be far more famous as the FireBlade. (In more recent years it’s been stylised as Fireblade.)
