There has been plenty said about the next generation of the Honda CBR1000RR, and lately the rumors have been heating up.
Solid news of an all-new machine for next first started in the WorldSBK paddock, where it was tipped that HRC would come back into the paddock with a factory team for the 2020 season – and on a new motorcycle.
Since then, we have seen some patents hinting at possible features of the new Fireblade, the most impressive of which is the idea that the 2020 Honda CBR1000RR could have active aerodynamics.
Now, we get word from our German colleagues at Speedweek that the new Honda Fireblade will debut sooner than we thought, making its arrival in October at the Tokyo Motor Show.
This means that we could see the 2020 Honda CBR1000RR as soon as October 23rd, instead of having to wait several weeks longer to see the bike debut at the EICMA show in Milan.
This news also means that a new CBR1000RR will not be the world premiere machine that Honda is teasing for the American-held AIMExpo later this month, which keeps our hope for a Honda CBR300RR still alive.
As for the liter bike, the details are still sparse, but we do know from the name that the bike will remain with an inline-four engine.
Early indications from Honda are that the CBR1000RR will be the most powerful inline-four on the market, which means topping the 202hp (151 kW) on tap with the BMW S1000RR.
The purpose of the Honda CBR1000RR is to win the WorldSBK Championship, and we seem to be just weeks away from the formal news that Alvaro Bautista and Takumi Takahashi will be riding the bike on an HRC team that is based with Honda’s MotoGP efforts in Europe.
To that aim, we can expect a more refined electronics package from Honda, which surely will run in concert with the aero package that can deploy and retract four winglets from inside the Fireblade’s fairing.
With an all new motor comes an all-new chassis, though we would expect to see Honda keeping to its roots with a twin-spar aluminum arrangement.
It will be interesting to see how Big Red positions this superbike though. Will the Honda CBR1000RR swim upstream and be priced more like its European counterparts, or will the Japanese brand continue to have different trim levels available?
If it is the latter, we can expect a reasonably priced street bike version of the Honda CBR1000RR for the next year, while perhaps the aero-equipped model might be an “SP” edition, built solely for racing homologation.
With the sport bike market changing rapidly over the years, maybe it is time for brand’s like Honda to adapt to the new market conditions with their superbike offerings, but we will have to wait and see if that is the case for 2020.
With a little over a month to wait until the 2020 Honda CBR1000RR debuts, we can surely expect more information about this liter-bike offering to leak between now and the Tokyo show. So, stay tuned.
Source: Speedweek
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