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Well, well, well – would you look at these. These are the secret Honda design drawings that PROVE that a CBR600 is in the works. And this run of drawings look VERY different to the COMPLETE V4 Superbike designs we brought you FIRST, months ago!

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The designs concentrate on the air intake route through the nose of the middleweight and the fairing brackets that support it. The intake routes the air flow directly into a frame front opening.

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So how do we know that this really IS the 600 and, say, not something extra from the V4 that might be passed off as an earlier part of a frame design? S’easy – because here’s the full, side-on static drawing of the new motorcycle that this patent is part of:

Yep, this is the bike that the air-intake routing design at the top of this article is a section of. It’s on the same patent listing, under the same number. The air intake routing is not part of the V4. It’s very much this CBR6. Lovely.

A few things to point out with the above side-on design:

1: The motor in the bike. We’ve outlined the engine in the CBR6 above with red circle 1 and we’ve coloured in the bike’s side profile of the engine. It’s an inline motor. NOT a V4 (just to show you the difference we’ve put the V4 side-on design below, if you look at the outline of the engine you’ll see that it’s clearly a V4 and very different to this motor in the 600).

2: The CBR600 in these designs has a pillion seat (red circle 2) and pillion pegs (red circle 4). Nothing of which has appeared in any designs for the V4 which has been designed purely as a single-seat sportbike with active aero in the seat unit’s ‘wing’. Take a look at the V4’s side on design to compare the differences in the entire back end.

3: The underseat exhaust (red circle 3) is routed with the pipe snaking around the underside of the engine and up to the silencer. The V4’s exhaust routes the rear two pipes from the motor down and behind the bracketing for the right footrest before linking up with the others to join the fat, stubby, low-slung right-side silencer.

So, these drawings are now all filed as one design for one bike – the CBR600 – and with this the comments made by the Public Relations Director at Honda France, Bruno Chemin (pictured below) make more sense about an overall direction to what’s coming from Honda. Chemin made these comments last October and we brought you them first once again on MoreBikes. Last year Chemin said: “If you ask me if this is the end after nearly 30 years of the CBR600 then I would say that simply, we can not be so categorical. The development is suspended and there are currently no plans for a future CBR600. But nothing forbids us to return to class in a few years, if the market has changed.”

At the tail end of last year Yamaha launched its updated R6 (pictured below) – a bike that captured a lot of headlines around the world and looks to be capable of delivering something that uses the latest MotoGP tech for the road at an affordable price. Perhaps this was the final move to edge Honda into rebirthing the CBR6 with these updated designs.

What do you think?

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Tony Carter

Tony has been riding motorcycles for over 35 years and he's been a motorcycle writer for over 25 of those. He's ridden almost every motorcycle you can think of at most places around the world and he's partial to some racing, too. A Taurus, Tony doesn't believe in horoscopes (but then that's exactly what a Taurus would say!) but he does believe in Mandalorians and their right to earn a living.