#rc213v-s

Dear MOby,

Here’s some eye candy for you: Honda’s MotoGP bike for the street, the RC213V-S, the picturesque Red Bull Ring in Austria, and Repsol Honda riders Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa ripping laps in their Alpinestars Tech-Air Race suits as they learn a new circuit on the MotoGP calendar. And speaking of Pedrosa, listen in as he narrates a lap of the track from memory.

For a company oftentimes accused of soullessness in an industry built upon an altar of passion, Honda’s been the epicenter of controversy since word of the RC213V-S and its corresponding price tag became public knowledge. Judging by the comments to the RC213V-S Review, the Video Review, and our ever-colorful Youtube commenters, it seems as though some can justify the bike’s valuation while many others cannot.

The four U.S. journalists invited to ride the 2016 Honda RC213V-S were the first journalists to ever ride the motorcycle. There were two street-spec bikes and two race-spec bikes available – that’s all. The anxiety of an over-exuberant journalist getting a too hot and tossing away Honda’s nearly quarter-million-dollar machine hung in the air among the HRC engineers like two-stroke exhaust at an indoor MX park. Crashing wasn’t an option. The irony is that we rode the Euro-spec bikes before the Euro journalists did!

Hard braking into a corner, rear wheel skipping across the pavement trying to come around one side or the other, release a little brake pressure, tip it in, pass a couple riders before the apex then begin accelerating toward the next corner. I didn’t do this during the press intro for the Honda RC213V-S at the Ricardo Tormo circuit in Valencia Spain, but having now piloted a bike similar to the one Marc Marquez rides in the heat of MotoGP combat provides insight into how the two-time Grand Prix champ manages to make the impossible seem like child’s play.

What can I add to what’s already been said about the new “MotoGP bike for the street” Honda unveiled yesterday? When I asked Large Project Leader Yosuke Hasegawa if he thought $184,000 was too expensive or too cheap, he didn’t think long before answering that the bike is way too inexpensive at that price. The joke is his hair was dark when he started on the project three years ago; now it’s white.

Honda is being super-secretive about its RC213V-S prototype, revealing almost no information except its name and its ties to the company’s MotoGP program.

Two-time reigning MotoGP World Champion Marc Marquez was on hand to help Honda reveal the new RC213V-S prototype, a street-legal version of his race bike.