“Hell yeah I can go to Japan!” Those were the words I immediately blurted out when Kris Keefer called me last week and asked if I could travel to a Honda media event instead of him. The timing couldn’t have been worse on my end, but who cares? It’s a trip to Japan! Well, here we are, nearly at the end of the trip already, and man, it’s been a whirlwind and a ton of fun.
The trip started with a visit to Motegi, a famous Japanese track that holds many high profile events, including MotoGP, and when I made it through customs and rounded the corner to see familiar faces from Gypsy Tales, Vital MX, Cycle News, Motocross Action, Whiskey Throttle, and more, I knew it was going to be a blast.
As the trip unfolded I started adding experiences to the highlight reel at a rapid pace. I honestly can't even keep up with all the stuff they let us see and do, the schedule was as efficient as Honda's production process! One highlight, I think, though: They allowed us to drive the bus around the track! Even in a bus this track is nuts. I can’t even begin to describe how terrifying it must be to pin it on a high powered street bike on the track’s ridiculously long straight stretch in the back. Speeds approach 200 miles in that section and it ends in a pretty significant descent, making braking into the next corner a dicey affair. Even in a bus it seemed wild. I love riding street bikes and have done some track days but 200 on that back straight? No thank you!
Next up was the Honda Collection Hall at Motegi, and when I tell you this place is heaven for a motorsports enthusiast, even if you aren’t a fan of Honda. Just looking at the rapid progression since the company’s official founding in 1948 is mind blowing—Honda went from making motorized bicycles (a product Soichiro Honda first built to make his wife’s life easier!) to winning two classes at the famed Isle of Man TT in 1961 and hasn’t looked back. I seriously don’t think anyone who works at this company ever sleeps! Formula 1 Cars, MotoGP bikes, the Honda Jett, models of global significance, countless championship bikes, it’s all there and more.
After that we traveled to Tokyo, which is definitely the wildest place I’ve ever been. Yes that’s right. It’s like walking through a casino full of 14 million people, with constant stimuli beating against your eyeballs. I even saw groups of people driving around on little go-karts. There are hordes of people everywhere and pedestrian traffic flows like a massive school of fish that never stops moving. Oh, and the 7-11’s here are extremely clean and sell super good sushi. Good gas station sushi. Talk about culture shock! Trey Canard’s alter ego, Terry, emerged at some point too, and without spilling too much tea, let’s just say he’s, ahem, very country.
After a visit to Honda Racing Corporation (HRC) HQ the next day, which was awesome, we hopped on a plane and flew south to Kumamoto to tour Honda’s largest domestic factory. If you own a CRF (or a ton of other Honda powersports products), this is where it was built.
Unfortunately we're not allowed to share photos or video of this process. I can tell you that the efficiency here is almost incomprehensible. Everyone knows exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and everyone moves with a purpose. It’s pretty amazing. We saw the CRF production line, and I can’t tell you how cool it was to see those dirt bikes being put together. The line doesn’t stop moving, with the motorcycle taking shape as it moves down the conveyor, ending with workers checking details as small as throttle and lever free play. Including some of the street bikes it produces, this building alone can crank out 1100 units per day. Per day!
The efficiency doesn’t end on the production line either. Even the gigantic cafeteria operates on the same principle, with workers moving in a very organized flow. Until we accidentally disrupted it, that is. When we were done eating we accidentally clogged up the line of workers depositing their dishes and trays for collection. Look, I had no idea you were supposed to put your chop sticks in a different slot than your spoon, okay? It was both embarrassing and comical at the same time to see how a few clueless (American) idiots could disrupt Honda’s carefully-orchestrated efficiencies.
Other interesting stops in the tour included checking out bench testing of CRF motors (they had a disassembled CRF motor that had been run continuously for 80 hours and still looked flawless), seeing airbox airflow and frame flex characteristics getting designed on computers, and a drop test of a CRF. They literally have a room where they drop motorcycles from specific heights just to see if they’ll stand up! We got to see them hoist a CRF to what looked like about 30 feet high, then just drop it. It was strangely thrilling and we all had a pretty loud, audible reaction to the drop, which seemed to amuse the workers.
Something else I thought was cool was the obvious passion there was everywhere we went, especially for motocross. I can’t even count the number of posters we saw all over the place featuring Jett and Hunter Lawrence, Chase Sexton, Chance Hymas, Tim Gajser, and more. They were everywhere! There were even a couple of gas tanks signed by the Lawrence brothers in the building that was making, well, gas tanks. The appreciation for the sport was definitely an unspoken universal language.
As the tour exited, I took one last glance back at a room full of hundreds of workers designing the next generation of Honda fun. I found myself chatting with Simon Cudby about how crazy it really is to bring a motorcycle into existence, especially in mass production. Cudby pointed out how it takes insanely intelligent people making this process happen, and how interesting it is that their vision translates into the visceral feelings and emotions we feel when we ride motorcycles. It kind of caught me off guard, but he’s right. All of this effort by people you’ll never meet just to deliver the average Joe a product that makes him or her to say, “Wow!” It’s pretty amazing.
