Honda's Secret Café
Honda’s Secret Café
Now it can be told
When Honda quit winners in the Grand Prix series, late in the 1960s, the sporting guys on the home team did their best to keep the spirit alive by offering race bits for the production street models, not least of which was the CB350, a sohc Twin with more potential than its specs predicted.
Sometime in the middle of that project, Honda’s planners wondered if the club race parts and the café-racer fad could be combined.
Honda’s technicians took a CB350 frame and installed a souped engine from “Pops” Yoshimura no less. They fitted a disc front brake from the new CB750 Four, a skinny fiberglass tank and seat from the GP parts bins, and finished up with headlight, taiilight and stoplight, just enough street bits to allow a license plate.
The project was shipped to the U.S. and tested here by Honda personnel and the staff of this very magazine. We all liked the bike, but when the votes came in, the execs decided the field was too narrow and the bike too demanding to attract enough buyers to make it worth the money and bother The actual experiment was parked in the corner of a warehouse where no one ever went. It was parked there for 10 years.
Yr. Clvr Rptr. himself had occasion to visit this warehouse. I saw the project, hauled it out, washed it down, did the things you do to a barn job, then named it “Red Rooster” after a blues song and an oceanracing sailboat-both sagas are too complicated to detail here, ask me later.
Friends in low places at American Honda worked out a way to sell me the bike, just in time for the arrival of vintage roadracing.
I am hopeless slow, but Red Rooster was the fastest 350 in the U.S. That’s not just me talking, the CBs were so fast back then the English banned them ’cause they whipped the Nortons and BSAs but good. I invent nothing; you could look it up.
And when you check the record, you’ll find me fifth in 350GP at Daytona, honest.
And then? A divorce cost me all my shop space, and because I rode Red Rooster twice a year, at Daytona and Laguna Seca, I sold it.
Next time I saw it, the guy was getting a ticket. Last time I saw it, he’d thrown it down in the road. Wish I knew where it is now.... -Allan Girdler
