Walter Barlow continues his excellent series of event recaps from the east coast – this time with a look at a recent vintage Japanese show in Leesport, Pennsylvania. Read on to how it went!
Guest Event Recap – 2025 Vintage Japanese Motorsports Show in Leesport, PA
Story by Walter Barlow
The show itself was not the most spectacular gathering of vintage motorcycles and folks finally deciding to part with rare and exotic parts caches. Otoh, there were some interesting bikes (and owner stories), the music was good, and I scored a reasonably rare magazine that I didn’t have.
Let me ‘splain. I’m a long time fan of Cycle Magazine – was a subscriber since 1968, and have over the years put together pretty much a complete collection/every issue going back to the mid-50s. Prior to Ziff Davis buying it from Floyd Clymer and installing Gordon Jennings as editor, it was pretty much an industry promotion vehicle. It was said that Clymer never met a motorcycle he didn’t like (especially if they bought advertising!) which is ok at a personal level, but not when you’re supposed to be doing reviews. Prior to Ziff Davis, I still find the issues somewhat interesting as a window into the sport before my time. Plus the advertising is pretty amusing.
Anyway, there was a magazine seller at the event at the show with a LOT of magazines for sale. I casually went through one of the milk crates that he was storing them in (I didn’t ask, but suspect he was a KLR owner) and came across an issue I didn’t remember seeing (old Cycles are one of the things I have an admittedly scarily awesome memory about). Since it had a couple of Nortons on the cover and I’m a Norton fan boy, I bought it – figuring that if I did have it I’d just drop it off at the next club meeting.
I briefly thought about going through the hundreds (thousands?) of issues he had there, but it was too nice a day to spend hours doing that. So I spoke with the guy, who, giving me his card, said he had a lot more magazines at home and would be glad to look for whatever I needed. These magazines are pretty much the only thing I collect – mostly because the writing is pretty damn good and I obviously like the subject matter, so you collectors out there can probably understand.
One of the great ads in this issue is below.
Consider: an actual Benelli 50cc Fireball motorcycle for $249, which has a 25 month/25,000 mile warranty.
But wait – there’s more: they include
A “Sebring” Helmet: $9.95 value
The Cosmo Winscreen: a $11.95 value
Saddlebags: a $9.95 value
Genuine leather AGV gloves: a $4.95 value
Honeycomb hand grips: a $1.50 value
(2!) Benelli T-Shirts: a $5.50 value
Wrap=around Sport Goggles: a $1.50 value
Universal mirror: a $1.50 value
It’s the kind of “honey, I saved so much I just had to buy two” deal that you dream about. OK, enough about my magazine compulsions and screaming deals form the past..
There were some (but disappointingly not as many as I expected) bikes there as well. I’ll post a couple of my favorites and provide a gallery link below.
Yamaha’s XS11 (some wags, bemoaning how big and powerful bikes were getting called it the Excess Eleven) was a surprising bike. Yamaha had pretty much stayed out of the superbike battle that Honda/Kawasaki/Suzuki had been fighting. Their previous “big bike”, the 1972 TX750, was a disaster from a reliability perspective (various reasons were cited – but Yamaha described the cause as “a problem with heat build-up that prevented stable engine performance and insufficient machine durability“.
Initial road test reports at the time were generally positive. Performance was good, the counter balancing shafts they used to quell big parallel twin vibrations worked, and it was pretty comfortable. It sold well the first year (+15,000 units) and ok (+7,500) the 2nd year; but sales cratered after that. Yamaha made a series of significant changes for the TX750A which resolved the issues – but the reputational damage was too much to overcome and the bike was pulled from the market in 1975.
FWIW, I thought it was a pretty good looking bike.
Back to the XS11 – seeing as it had a shaft drive and weighed around 600 pounds, you’d probably think “comfortable tourer”, and you’d be right. Except – when introduced it was the undisputed Superbike king, by a wide margin. ¼ mile times were comfortably in the 11’s when pretty much all the others were in the 12’s. In addition to that amazing motor (as much of a revelation at the time as the Z1’s motor in its time), the Eleven had great brakes, good tires (though no street tires at the time were really “enough” for that motor), and a chassis that was at somewhat adequate (the Japanese were on the verge of knowing how to make these large bike handle). It reigned as ¼ mile production run king for a couple of years thereafter (I’ll guess it was eventually dethroned by one of the Suzuki GS1100 models). Well done, Yamaha!
The show had one (actually 2) of my all time favorites – the Honda CBX. As an aside, the CBX was the reason I very carefully called the XS11 the ¼ mile production run king for a couple of years, since both Cycle and Cycle World (iirc) had a very early CBX that ran much quicker (mid 11s) – but production models were somewhat off that pace. The styling of the CBX is such that it’s one of the few bikes that look virtually perfect in stock form and are very seldomly improved with customization – despite the functional improvement customization might bring. That extends to the exhaust – and both of these take the two approaches many folks take with CBXs.
The 6/6 pipe organ:
And the 6/1 Bassani. This is also painted in a non-standard color, and it looks pretty nice.
There’s a fascinating backstory re: the CBX exhaust according to Cycle. Someone at Honda wanted the exhaust sound to be as “significant as the bike”. So a small team went to a Japanese air base and recorded fighters (mostly F4 Phantoms) taking off. After 10 days, they came back and designed an exhaust system that was said to capture the Phantom sound perfectly. Unfortunately (almost naturally) the system was nixed (an exec said “you’ve gone too far…we cannot build motorcycles that sound like jet fighters.”)
Fair enough: they wound up building a system that made it sound like a Porsche.
But somewhere, collecting what passes for dust in the hospital-clean Asaka research facility rests a mythical arrangement of pipes, tube, baffles, and screens which attached to a certain 6-cylinder 24-valve engine gives off the transcendental whoop of a deadly weapon of war.
Ok, back to reality – I was blown away by the CBX, but couldn’t afford it. I wound up a while later with a new 1981 CB900F. Over the next half dozen years it seemed that when CBXs were around for sale, I didn’t have the dough, and when I had some disposable bucks there were none to be found (remember, pre-internet days). Finally, in the late 80’s money and opportunity came together. At that point, motorcycling had changed a lot and the CBX was far from leading edge; and more importantly, I found that I liked my 900F more than the two CBXs I tried (an early one and one of the zoot-suit sport touring ones, which I thought were beautiful). Besides, a VF1000F was whispering in my ear lol. So I never filled that CBX hole in my heart – but I kept the CB900F for 19 years (and bought another one in 2015); and have owned 6 VF1000Fs over the years. So while I can appreciate what the CBX is and was, paraphrasing W.C. Fields, I feel about them the way he felt about elephants “I like looking at them, but don’t need to own one.”
Honda Hurricane. Nothing special – never owned one or wanted to (though the red/white CBR1000F was tempting). I am only showing it in order to give a link to what I think is the best motorcycle TV commercial ever made. Ever.
There were a number of big Kawasakis at the show – I liked this one best.
The word “big” in this context is pretty interesting. I remember that everyone (including me) thought the Z1, and the other open classers, was physically very big when they came out. These days they seem sized more like current 500-650cc bikes. Modernish tourers, sport-tourers, and adventure bikes have really reset size perspectives.
PS: a Honda Ascot in the background- some folks feel it might be one of the worst bikes Honda ever made. Looked pretty cool and promising though- especially with that name (probably showing my age there lol).
Honda CB500/550F Cafe.
One of the best bikes Honda has ever made. A very well balanced bike that did pretty much everything well without overpowering a rider. Probably some sentiment at play here as I had a pretty well worked 500 cafe in the 70’s that was my intro to roadracing as well as the bike that I took on some of my most memorable early motorcycling trips.
Besides, Bo Derek as the cover girl shot at its intro? Tres Cool!
Ok, maybe just an 8 at that time.
I’m going to stop now: more from respecting the time you have to devote to long-form motorcycling writing than any lack of things to say LOL.
But here’s a link to the pictures I took. Enjoy.