John McAvoy tells us what we need to know…
The naked bike sector is molten hot right now and to ensure Honda’s at the forefront of people’s minds, it’s just unleashed its latest iteration Hornet. With impressive tech, great performance and a price-tag to make its rivals weep, you can be sure a fair few of these are set to sell fast
With the big ticket ‘Supernaked’ class well and truly occupied by 200bhp fully loaded KTMs, Ducatis, Kawasakis and Aprilias, the trend towards more affordable, simpler naked bikes with enough power to entertain is in full swing. Yamaha, Triumph, Ducati, BMW and Kawasaki have been right in the thick of the action, and while Honda have had the CB1000 in their range, it’s never really ticked the ‘Exciting’ box, but now they’ve only gone and given the CB1000 a ‘Hornet’ badge, which should mean a whole different proposition.
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The 2025 CB1000 Hornet, just like the Hornet 900, gets its engine from a discontinued Fireblade, but this time not from one that’s already out of date. This one comes from the 2017-2019 Fireblade which has been slightly detuned to 154bhp in the SP version, and 148bhp in the base version. Both figures are bang on the money for where Honda are pitching this bike at £9999 for the SP and £8999 for the base.
Industry rumours suggest that Honda originally wanted to use the 2008 Fireblade engine as per the CB1000, but feedback from European dealers was lukewarm to say the least. Honda listened and turned to the next generation Fireblade engine from the 2017 bike, hence the big delay between when Honda first mooted the Hornet and it actually appearing. That engine had quite modest power figures by superbike standards at the time, but at 189bhp it’s comfortably in the ballpark for an affordable naked bike in 2025, especially when getting it from its Euro 4 spec to today’s Euro 5+ spec would also conveniently just happen to take it down to the 154bhp quoted for the Hornet, which is plenty.
This was done courtesy of narrower throttle bodies, lower cam lift and conservative cam timing with a tweak to the ignition timing, a new ride-by-wire set up, too, plus clipping 2000rpm off the revs has all helped the Fireblade engine make the jump in terms of emissions and therefore fit for modern-day purpose quite straightforward while also landing on just the right amount of power and torque. Other key changes to the engine include cast pistons instead of forged ones to keep the cost down, shorter gear ratios from 1st to 4th, and an up-and-down quickshifter which, curiously, has adjustable cut time for both upshifts and down shifts separately, which I think might be a first on any production bike.
Both bikes get an all-new steel twin beam frame, which is bespoke for the Hornet and which has pretty aggressive geometry. In case there was any doubt as to what the intention is with the Hornet’s chassis, it’s rake and trail is the same as a Triumph Street Triple 765RS and its wheelbase is 21mm shorter than the KTM 990 Duke, and it has a 180-section rear tyre – the same as a Yamaha MT-09. Key differences between the SP and the base model are as well as getting the extra power, the SP also gets Brembo Stylema brake calipers instead of Nissins, and an Ohlins TTX36 rear shock over the base spec which gets Showa kit which only has adjustment for preload in the rear shock.
Then there’s the price, which at less than £10k for a bike with Ohlins suspension, Brembo Stylema brakes and over 150bhp is simply amazing for the SP, and just under £9000 for the base bike causes a real headache for the competition. For reference, a Yamaha MT-10 comes in at £14,000, the Ohlins-shod version is £16,000 – granted it has a little bit more power, a lot more tech and the Ohlins is electronic. The 2025 Ducati Streetfighter V2S with Ohlins and Stylemas is £16,000, the Suzuki GSX-S1000 which has no bling whatsoever and about the same power and is therefore comparable to the base Hornet is £2,000-£3000 more! The 2025 Kawasaki Z900 has no price released at the time of writing, but the previous SE model – which has the bling but not quite as much power as the Hornet – is/was just over £11,000.
This could be Honda’s finest hour, and on paper this could be the worthiest Honda since 1969 to wear the ‘CB’ badge, let alone the ‘Hornet’ badge. If there’s one thing that history tells us about Honda, it is that when they decide to go big and go hard, they have a habit of doing so with such success that they make everyone else look a bit daft. I’m thinking RC30, Fireblade, NR750, RCV213V-S, VFR750 and yes, the CB750 are just some examples of when Honda go big.
It’s been a while – to put it mildly – since Honda have produced a game-changer, and with the Hornet’s spec sheet promising a colossal amount for the price, I spent a good deal of time on the journey to the press launch wondering what the catch was. Then we arrived in Benidorm…
Who knew that Benidorm and Honda could deliver such unexpected surprises? In the case of Benidorm, if you head into the surrounding hills instead of the seafront, not only will you be rewarded with better views, but you will also find the most spectacular riding roads, the likes of which I can honestly say hand on heart are amongst the very best I’ve ever ridden on anywhere in the world. Billiard table smooth, virtually traffic free, mostly second and third gear corners linked by straight bits of Tarmac rarely more than a few hundred metres long for the whole 150Kkm we spent riding. It was motorcycling nirvana.
As for the Honda, the first thing, and I mean the very first thing, you notice about the Hornet, before you even get out of the car park of the hotel, is just how light it feels at very low speed, far lighter than a 212kg bike has any right to feel. At 212kg fully fuelled, the Hornet is the same as the MT-10 but feels more like a Street Triple at low speed. In an instant, it becomes obvious that the Hornet is not like any Honda that’s been made for a long time.
When you put a Fireblade into gear and pull away, you know instantly that you’re on something very serious and very capable, and the message is clear – ‘You had better have brought your A-Game’. The message that the Hornet screams loud and clear is, ‘You and me are going to have a lot of fun today’, which, coming from a Honda, is a bit like a librarian egging you on to do shots of absinth with them – it’s just not the sort of messaging you’re used to getting from a Honda. And boy oh boy, the Hornet absolutely delivers on its promise and first impression.
Once you get dialled into the Hornet’s outrageous agility, and instant playfulness, more good stuff keeps jumping out at you, with the next star of the show being the engine. It’s simply brilliant. The combination of the delivery of power and torque with the shorter gears means that it punches hard at low rpm but doesn’t tail off as the revs climb. The result is an engine that is incredibly flexible because you can hang on to lower gears between corners and rev it hard, or if you prefer to, you can short shift and cover the ground just as quick.
Leaving it in a lower gear and using the upper third of the rev range is not normally something I’d do for long periods on the road because typically the higher up the revs, the more sensitive the throttle becomes, which can be tricky, but the way Honda have set up the fuel injection is so good that even at those high revs, the throttle feels really smooth and easy to control the off/on transition. It never even occurred to me to try any of the other rider modes – the Hornet comes with Rain, Standard and Sport modes, plus a couple of programable User modes – which is something usually you would do in search of a smoother throttle.
I did, however, use one of the ‘User’ modes to have the traction control switched off in, but alas unlike pretty much every other bike manufacturer, every time you switch the Hornet off, the traction control is reinstated even in the programable ‘User’ mode. This means that you have to access the settings for the mode and switch the traction control off every time you come back to the bike, which earns the Hornet one of very few small marks against it.
Switching the traction control off is something really worth doing for several reasons, not least because there’s plenty of grip from the Bridgestone S22s, but also in the event of a wheelie happening, the system doesn’t have an IMU to measure what’s going on with the actual position of the bike’s chassis. Instead, it uses the same basic set of the very early traction control systems by measuring front and rear wheel speeds, so you initially get lots of lift, then a sudden cut in power that only restores when the wheel is back on the ground, and you’ve completely shut the throttle. It’s really not great, and it’s far better to just have it switched off. With an IMU the process would be much smoother, and it would even be possible to separate traction control from anti-wheelie.
On the one hand, I could say that the lack of IMU and/or the ability to permanently switch the traction control off via a programable ‘User’ mode is understandable when you look at the price of the Hornet, and it is. However, on reflection it occurs to me that Honda could probably do those two things really easily and it would probably only add a few hundred quid to the price of each bike, given that they already have the technology on other models in their range. Anyway, it is what it is, a basic set of rider aids, which execute their tasks in a basic way, and it takes about five seconds to deactivate the traction control, so in the grand scheme of things it’s no big deal especially when the rest of the bike is so brilliant. A BMW-style ‘fun’ button on the switchgear that you can press and hold to switch the traction control off without having to navigate through menus would be perfect.
One piece of tech on the Hornet that I really did like when I eventually found it – the interface with all the tech is not especially intuitive – is the ability to adjust the quickshifter’s cut time independently for up shifts and down shifts. It’s very clever, and as it turns out very useful, and it definitely falls under the heading of things you never knew would be handy until you actually had the chance to use it. There’s a selection of screen layouts that you can choose from for the new 5” colour TFT, all of which are very good – manufacturers usually offer just one or two decent ones and a load of options that are just there for the sake of it and so the manufacturer can claim a big number of options. Not so on the Hornet, there’s just a handful, but they’re all spot on.
Back on the road, and the levels of composure that the Hornet delivers at the same time as its agility is another one of those traits that only comes from a combination of just the right amount of weight in just the right place, supported by suspension that’s set up just so, and geometry that holds it all together. It’s the hallmark of a bike that has been thoroughly tested and developed right down to component level. The suspension has been developed bespoke for the Hornet, and the result of all of that is that the Hornet has a feel and level of composure in all scenarios whether it be loading up under high cornering forces and changes of direction or brushing off bumps with a level of control and damping that makes many bikes twice the Hornet’s price feel cheap and lacking in suspension control.
While the Hornet does ride and feel like something far more expensive, there are little clues around it that do suggest how Honda have managed to produce the bike for what they have. While the brake system does have Brembo Stylema calipers, there is a lack of feel at the lever which could be down to either a cheaper master cylinder, or more likely a basic ABS pumping system is what I’d put my money on. It’s okay, and I’m not mentioning it as a criticism of the bike or its braking system, it’s really just a point to note. Elsewhere, some of the components such as the levers, rearsets, and some of the welding on the exhaust are from the lower end of the quality scale, but by no means cheap.
As a rule of thumb, I try to avoid the subjective topic of looks, and whether a bike looks good or not – that’s up to you. However, what I do want to commit to print is that for a company that have been producing very safe/conservative/boring looking bikes, the Hornet is a breath of fresh air. It’s edgy, distinct, unashamedly Japanese, and even parked up on its sidestand it looks like it means business, which is very unlike Honda to be so in your face. There’ve been a few comments on the colour of the SP being a bit boring, but in the flesh it looks great, and the gold wheels really do work with the gunmetal grey paint. It’s also nice to see a total lack of wings or any effort whatsoever towards the subject of aerodynamics.
So, the Hornet is properly fast, handles like a dream, has a decent level of finish, looks the part, sounds the part, and costs a snip of what its competition does. What’s the catch? Well, if there is one, I can’t find it, and I really, really looked. It is an undeniable fact that I laughed my head off more in 150kms on the Hornet than I have done on any Honda, probably any motorbike, for a very long time. At its core is a bike that is fun, and it’s fun because it’s so easy to get on with. A total novice could easily enjoy the Hornet every bit as much as a seasoned hack like me, and all these things are qualities which have nothing to do with the price whatsoever, but we must talk about the price, almost reluctantly because there’s a risk that the Hornet becomes defined by its price tag, which, while it absolutely deserves to be, seems a little unfair, because it is a properly brilliant bike regardless of its price-tag.
Thanks to its ludicrous price, whichever corner of the motorcycling world you look at for a comparison to the Hornet 1000, the answer always seems to be the same: there isn’t one. There really isn’t a bike, naked or otherwise, that offers so much for so little, and that puts me into uncomfortable territory when it comes to committing profound words to print for fear of overstating just how significant a bike the Hornet 1000 is. I’ve wracked my brains to think of any bike that comes even close to the same postcode as the Hornet for value AND ability, and I’ve got nothing.
I really do think the Hornet 1000 is going to provide a complete reset to certainly the whole naked bike sector in the same way that the Fireblade did to the superbike sector back in 1992. Every other manufacturer of naked bikes now has a serious headache to deal with, because unless you really don’t like the looks or colour scheme, there is literally no reason to not buy the Hornet 1000… apart from the fact that Honda UK may well sell out of them; they’re only bringing 1000 into the UK in 2025, and my guess is they’ll all be sold before they even arrive. The Hornet not only has the potential to reset the new naked bike sector, but because it represents such astonishing value for money, I think it also has potential to cause a problem in the used bike market, too. Dealers are going to have to re-evaluate the value of a lot of their used bike stock, too, or sit tight until the Hornet sells out.
So, there it is, I really didn’t see that coming. By pure chance, this was my first-ever Honda press launch after 17 years of writing for magazines, and I’ll be perfectly honest, never in my wildest dreams did I expect my first Honda launch to be such a significant one. I will confess to expecting another decent, useable naked bike, and we would all be able to celebrate the expansion of the sector. I did not expect to be writing about a generational game-changer, but that is exactly what I’ve ended up doing.
Just wow!
The Hornet’s road to redemption…
For some people of a certain age, the name ‘Hornet’ conjures up memories and thoughts of a bike that when it came along was right in the thick of the 90s boom in motorcycle sales and can be credited with providing literally thousands of people their first tase of what a ‘proper’ bike was. Hornets were cool, fun and versatile, and were equally competent in the hands of a novice as they were an experienced rider. Using the engine from their spectacularly popular CBR600F brought supersport performance to a different package that was popular with headbangers and newbies alike.
For other people of an even older certain age, the ‘CB’ name represents something even more significant. The Honda CB750 from 1969 is regarded by many to be THE original superbike by virtue of the fact that its fundamental architecture is still to this day the starting point for many, if not all, motorcycle designers. It was the first mass-produced four-cylinder bike, the first with an electric starter, the first with disc brakes, and it killed off what was left of the British motorcycle industry at a stroke. It also caused Kawasaki to stop their own superbike project that they were working on and go back to their drawing board to start again on what would later be their Z1. In case you weren’t already aware, hopefully you see now that any bike which carries the ‘CB’ and/or ‘Hornet’ badges, has a lot to live up to.
The 600 Hornet debuted in 1998, got a hefty update in 2007 with a CBR 600RR engine replacing the old ‘Steelie’ CBR 600F engine. Then again in 2011 it got another update, but this one was much less exciting, with another new engine, again from the modern-day CBR600F, which, being blunt, was nothing like as good as the original CBR600F and not even in the same postcode as the CBR600RR. Some might say – me included – that when the final version of the Hornet 600 was discontinued in 2013, it was sweet mercy, because it just wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the previous two versions. The Hornet had lost its sting, and was trading only on its name, which you can only do for so long…
Obviously, in 2023 Honda reintroduced the Hornet name and CB derivative, this time on a bike with a 755cc parallel twin engine and Transalp frame, so while not at all following the same formula as the original Hornet, according to Bruce the Hornet 750 is a fun, versatile bike that can be made to go very fast if desired or is just as happy pootling around, and so very much worthy of the name. So, it was with a huge sigh of relief that when Honda announced the new CB1000 Hornet for 2025, they confirmed that it would have a Fireblade engine at its heart just like the original, bigger Hornet.
You see, while the Hornet 600 was being lapped up in the showrooms in the late 90s, by 2002 Honda figured that with the Fireblade also flying out showroom doors, surely they could apply the Hornet formula to it, too, and so the Hornet 900 was created. It used an older 919cc Fireblade engine which had been around between 1996 and 1999, so arguably they resurrected an engine from a Fireblade which by virtue of being discontinued for several years, was a mistake. The Hornet 900 never really lit up the sales charts like its 600cc stablemate did, and the Hornet 900 was discontinued just five years later, having never really bothered the sales charts.
Maybe the fact that the 600 Hornet used the same engine from a sportsbike at the same time while the bigger Hornet used an older, detuned version of the bigger sportsbike engine might be why the 900 never caught the imagination of the buying public like the 600 did. Maybe the market and buying habits had moved on by the time the 900 came out. After all, by 2007 when the Hornet 900 got the chop, the KTM SuperDuke 990 was already getting its first update. The Hornet 900 with its engine from 1996 was already outdated by the time it was launched.
Specs:
Honda CB1000 Hornet SP
Engine:
Type: 1000cc, liquid-cooled, 4-cyl
Bore x Stroke: 76mm x 55.1mm
Compression: 11.7:1
Fuelling: PGM FI
Claimed Power: 155bhp @11,000rpm
Claimed Torque: 107Nm @ 9000rpm
Chassis
Frame: Twin spar steel
F Suspension: Showa 41mm SFF-BPP upside-down forks, fully adjustable
R suspension: Ohlins TTX36 Monoshock, fully adjustable
Front brakes: Brembo Stylema monobloc calipers
Rear brake: Single-piston caliper, 245mm disc
Electronics
Riding Modes: Yes
Traction Control: Yes
ABS: Yes
Quickshifter/Autoblipper: Yes
Wheelie Control: No
Launch Control: No
Dimensions:
Wheelbase: 1455mm
Seat Height: 809mm
Wet Weight: 212kg
Fuel Capacity: 17 litres
Info:
Price: £9999From: www.honda.co.uk
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