Honda to debut new CBR600RR this year?

Thursday, 7 May 2020

Honda could be working on a brand new CBR600RR, set to be unleashed later this year.

This is an as-yet-unconfirmed rumour so it could well be false but if Visordown is correct we could see it debut at the Malaysian round of the MotoGP world championship.

The date is still up in the air, given global travel restrictions and whatnot, but right now the Malaysian round is scheduled to take places between the 30th of October and November 1st.

This is the 2016 CBR600RR, one of the last years Honda built the supersports machine.

Using Malaysia might seem odd, given Honda has a home race at Motegi starting on the 18th of October but the Asian market is massive for two-wheelers. Right now the biggest sellers range from between 125cc to 400cc but it's a reasonable assumption those riders will be looking for more power eventually.

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Honda's CBR600RR is currently in a funny place of being discontinued in Europe due to not meeting Euro4 emissions laws but still on sale in America and some other countries. The model hasn't been updated since about 2017, with the last major revision happening in 2013.

The supersport class has been stagnating for a while but recent efforts from the likes of Yamaha and Kawasaki show there's still a bit of interest there.

If Honda is indeed making a return, another rumour from Japan's Young Machine reckon it could take after the larger CBR1000RR-R in becoming an all-out track weapon, along with the extra 'R' in the name.

This would indicate Honda wants to return to supplying the Moto2 grid with engines, something it was responsible for up until 2019 when Triumph took over.

A CBR600RR-R should then offer power bettering the 100kW Kawasaki ZX-6R, which uses a slightly oversized 636cc engine to beef out the torque and mid-range while also offering more power. The 599cc R6, meanwhile, makes 87kW, roughly what the last CBR600RR made.

Triumph did put its Moto2 engine on the road, in the limited Daytona Moto2 765. It uses a slightly detuned competition engine stuffed inside a tweaked Daytona 675 chassis. In race trim, Triumph's triple makes around 103kW.

Hopefully the rumours are true and Honda returns to the 600cc class with a proper competitor. We should know more as we get closer to October. Of course, there's always the EICMA motorcycle show to look forward to in early November, which is where a lot of manufacturers choose to debut new wares.