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Some bikes become legends for what they won, and others for what they dared to be. The Honda CX500 belongs firmly in the second camp: it was the first V-twin Honda ever built, with the vee set at 72 degrees and the cylinders rotated 27 degrees to give the carburation a better flow path, and a gear-driven cam train. An odd engine, a different engine, and absolutely iconic. A unicorn, plain and simple. We brought this particular example over from a private collection in Italy, and the project was born with a name already attached: a Repsol engineer who wanted something nobody else had.
The idea was clear from the very first sketch: a deeply personal café racer, compact, low, short and agile, with all its personality concentrated in two places. The engine, finished in black so that unmistakable vee reads like a piece of sculpture. And the tank, wearing HRC's war paint in grey, blue and red, which isn't a throwaway nod but a statement of intent about where this engine comes from.
The #BOLT19 made the cover of Fuel magazine and of BikingZone, headed off to Texas and came back to Europe from there: it has travelled more than many brand-new bikes. But what we love most about it isn't the magazine covers or the air miles: it's that it's still a CX500, with its improbable engine and its gear-driven cams, and that anyone who sees it up close understands within two seconds exactly why we chose this one and nothing else.
