DESIGNING FOR 200 BMEP AND 22,000 RPM

How Honda's Grand Prix motorcycle program in the 1960s created the world's most-advanced IC engines.

Fire-bombing destroyed Japan's 66 largest cities and their industry during World War II. After the war, more than 200 makers of light motorbikes sprang into being because such transportation could be quickly tooled for production. Only a few of the startups - those known for reliable, maintainable products - survived. By the late 1950s, saturation of the domestic market imposed a choice: export or stagnate.

Only a few returning U.S. servicemen had ever heard of Honda motorcycles. Who would buy them? Soichiro Honda, a self-taught mechanic and former auto racer, knew that great names had been made through innovation and international racing success. On a 1950s tool-buying trip to Europe, he bought two racing machines - a German NSU and an Italian Mondial - for study in Japan. He committed his company to four-stroke engines and declared that it would compete in the Isle of Man TT road races that had shaped motorcycle development since 1907.