David Thorpe’s 1986 Honda HRC500
April 02, 2007
The mighty factory Honda team is widely regarded as the Holy Grail of factory teams – be it trials, motocross or road racing, they have an unprecedented record as far as success goes and it’s not by accident, the teams are always well funded and they do their homework and the letters HRC (Honda Racing Corporation) have graced the trickest bikes ever made.
This particular bike is about as factory as anything the team produced and as it was totally handmade, there was nothing which was grafted from the stock bike, and the advantage of having one of these rides was awesome over the privateers, let alone the other factory’s efforts.
David Thorpe was a legend, don’t be under any illusion about that – he was an inspiration to a whole generation with his style and grace on the track matched with being a gentleman off it, as he rolled into the classic circuits in a Porsche with the infamous DKT5 number-plate to put Britain on top of the MX stage in the eighties. It was an awesome time to be an English motocross fan.
With David’s dad Keith ( the ‘Colonel’ ) working on the bikes they made a formidable team together with Steve Whitelock (who is now the AMA motocross series manager) running the show and Walter Fleck as the team co-ordinator, and the team was based 20km outside Brussels in Belgium to be more centrally located for the GP events. With Andre Malherbe and Eric Geoboers as team-mates there was no shortage of talent rider wise!
The actual bike featured here is the very same machine David won the British Championship and the World Championship that year in Luxembourg. We had this bike on display on the MOTO Magazine stand at the Dirt Bike Show in November 05, and this bike was given to David as a thank you from the manufacturer.
This, the 1986 model which is widely regarded as one of the very best of the bikes HRC ever produced, features the low slung alloy tank which required a small vacuum fed fuel pump to get the fuel into the carb as the tank went so low to get the centre of gravity down. The right hand rad was enormous and even had a kink half way down its length to make sure it didn’t stick out, and again helped with the gravity issue.
Everything is hand made and custom made for the rider in question, from the frame geometry to the choices of what gearbox to use; they changed from three to four to five gears, though David ended up using the four-speed predominately, the custom made magnesium crankcases made the job of making changes easy – add to the fact there were multi options for actual power delivery, be it with a long or short stroke motor, that’s before you even worry about porting and compression ratio options! It’s actually mind-boggling how many choices these guys were faced with, and the Japanese HRC engineers were prepared to try anything the rider requested.
The suspension was taken care of by a Japanese Showa engineer appointed to the team, who used to use a dyno shock to test the suspension was working up to par before it got fitted back on the bike. The wheels were nothing like what was available on a stock bike, with super fat spokes and even larger hub diameter for the rear sprocket that was custom made for the team by AFAM. The actual horsepower figures were never released, even to the team members, but in the words of Rolls Royce, it was ‘ample’.
Each rider would have three bikes in total, two for racing and one for practice as they were training on full-on factory bikes, not modified stockers as the difference was simply too much. There would have been enough parts to build more bikes for each guy, but there was no need. The heartbreaker was that every bike except two were crushed by order of the Japanese management. One is in David’s personal collection and one is in the Honda museum in Japan. The Honda HRC500 was simply as good as factory bikes ever got – there is no better. Period.
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