Upcoming supercharged triple gets closer
Despite being nothing more than a bare chassis and engine Honda’s V3 concept model was the undoubted star of last year’s EICMA show in Milan and now it’s taken a big step closer to production as Honda files for trademark rights to the name ‘V3R’.
Honda has been clear that it hopes to get the V3, which was shown complete with a radical electric supercharger at EICMA, into production, but the new trademark gives a clue as to the style of bike – or bikes – that the engine will appear in.
Think back to Honda’s previous model branding and there’s a fairly rigid structure to the combinations of letters and numbers used. For example, ‘CB’ always means ‘street, four-stroke’ and adding an ‘R’ means you get a fairing thrown into the mix. When Honda has a V-engined, four-stroke street bike, the name starts ‘V’ followed by a letter representing the number of cylinders: VT means ‘V-twin’ while VF means ‘V-four.’
Honda has never made a V3 four-stroke production bike before (although there was the NS400R two-stroke) and it throws a spanner in the works when it comes to naming. After all, ‘three’ starts with a T, the same as ‘two,’ so Honda can’t use ‘VT’ for its V-three machine.
The answer? Use the number ‘3’ instead. So where a sports V-twin is ‘VTR’ and a sports V-four is ‘VFR’, a sports bike using the new triple will be ‘V3R’ – the name featuring in the new trademark application.
If that’s the route Honda is taking, it’s likely that the final naming structure will use the ‘V3R’ sequence followed by numbers relating to the capacity – the V3 shown at EICMA is believed to be around the 800cc mark, but that’s yet to be confirmed – and then additional letters to indicate just how sporty the resulting bike is. Honda normally uses a final ‘F’ for tamer, all-round models – think CBR600F – while ‘R’ means race-replica. The more Rs, the more extreme the bike is, with the latest CBR1000RR-R Fireblade carrying a triple-R suffix.
If Honda follows that pattern, it’s likely that the first four-stroke V3 production model could be named something like ‘V3R800R’ or ‘V3R800F’.
While it’s possible the bike will simply be called ‘V3R’ without a number or an additional, style-defining suffix, Honda has been clear that its future strategy revolves around the increased use of platform-sharing, particularly on relatively low-volume, high-price bikes aimed at developed markets. It’s already a master of that art, spinning multiple models from the Africa Twin platform, for example, and basing the new CB750 Hornet and Transalp on a common structure, not to mention the CB500, CB650 and NC750 model ranges, which have each resulted in an array of different models. When the V3 engine reaches showrooms, it’s likely to find a home in multiple different machines.
