The most exotic Honda CBR954RR ever...
If you're totally serious about winning the hardest of the real road races - the notorious Macau GP and Isle of Man TT races - you need the evilest, fastest, trickest machinery available.
This FireBlade has more trick bits in it than a Witch's handbag, but rather than eye of newt and wing of bat, this thing has £70,000 worth of the very latest in two-wheel technology to produce an amazing 180 brake horse power at the rear wheel and a top speed of 200mph.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the worlds fastest, most powerful, and probably the most exotic, expensive, FireBlade project that has ever been carried out. In road racing, Honda are very big players - in fact the biggest - and want nothing else than to score with race wins.
Our story begins in June 2000, when Honda set out to take the TT by storm, employing four professional riders and previous Isle of Man race winners, all on factory Hondas. That's the way Honda like to do things.
Jim Moodie and Iain Duffus were signed to ride the highly tuned, all-new fuel-injected F1 Fireblades, whilst John McGuinness and the late, great Joey Dunlop would be piloting the works SP-1s. At the time, in the SP-1 Honda Britain/Vimto team, things were not going too badly. A Formula 1 win for Joey the legend - sadly his penultimate TT win, as he died just weeks later at a road race in Estonia. McGuinness was third, as Jeffries broke down whilst in the lead on the V&M R1. Moodie took a fifth place, complaining that the FireBlade was underpowered , whilst Duffus retired on his CBR.
Results started to suffer slightly in the Senior race when, Sir Joey finished 3rd with McGuinness 4th. Moodie refused to race the Blade and Duffus retired once more. This left Honda just a touch sore, and aiming to pull out all the stops and return the following year to dominate. Over the winter months no expense was spared, and a FireBlade was designed purposely for the job in hand. The Blade project was commissioned by Honda UK's Roger Harvey and was to be built to a highly-tuned spec by Paul Bird Motorsports. Technician Stuart Bland was appointed headman, keeping in close contact with Japan's very own Tadao Baba - Mr Honda FireBlade himself. No one in the world knows his or her way around a FireBlade like this man, who designed every version of the CBR900RR. Baba-san and Stuart were in regular contact with each other throughout its creation leading up to the TT, and Baba himself even visited the FW developments base in Garstang, Lancashire.
Baba-san has had success in the states in the Formula Xtreme class in America, where they are allowed to run almost fully tuned engines with full race chassis set up. Erion are one of the US' leading engine tuners, and have been working closely with Baba-san, sharing further development s in race performance and technology. The culmination of all this work, is probably the world's hottest and finest FireBlade, which you see on these very pages. Honda really went to town, determined not to return from the Island without at least two Gold replicas from the 2001 TT races.
