Sometimes I wish I could go back nearly 50 years, knowing what I know now and having experienced the great motorcycles of today, and ride the first motorcycle I ever owned, that creaky, used 1976 Honda CB360T I bought that had probably been in a flood.
I’d like to know: Just how much was I putting my life at risk with the crappy wooden brakes and hard tires? Riding home from a concert late at night through the countryside of West Virginia, did that anemic incandescent headlight illuminate anything in the darkness ahead that I was hurtling into? In sum, just how much of a miracle was it that I survived at all?
The me of today, accustomed as I am to powerful brakes with excellent feel and ABS as a backup, sticky radial tires that provide amazing grip, and bright, LED headlights, I imagine I’d be terrified if I repeated some of the rides I took as an 18-year-old on my first bike. I can’t go back, and that’s probably just as well. But recently I did the next best thing.
Honda is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Gold Wing this year, and I got to test the anniversary model as part of a two-day ride from the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, to Bike Week in Daytona Beach, Florida. If you want to learn about the 50th Anniversary Gold Wing and little about the history of Honda’s flagship touring bike, read my story at Common Tread, along with my first look article describing all the 2025 Gold Wing models. But I’m here today to talk not about the newest Gold Wing, but the oldest one. And what it’s like to ride it.
Who shrunk the old bike? The Gold Wing was a large motorcycle when it came out in 1975. It looks a little different from the perspective of 2025.
The Gold Wing was always a model built with the U.S. market in mind. With its liquid-cooled, flat-four-cylinder engine and shaft drive, it was almost automotive compared to the other motorcycles of its time. Even though that first-generation Wing came from the factory with no weather protection or luggage (a fairing was optional, designed in cooperation with Craig Vetter of aftermarket Windjammer fame), it was also more capable of covering the bigger distances of North America. Intended to build on the performance momentum created in 1969 by the CB750, the Gold Wing was referred to internally as “the king of kings.” Now, 50 years later, it’s clear it is one of the most important and enduring models Honda ever produced.
Rob Doyle, one of the managers of Honda’s press fleet, brought to Barber an original 1975 Gold Wing with about 31,000 miles on it that belongs to his brother. We had a narrow window between the time when the other users vacated the Barber Motorsports Park track and sunset, so each of us in our little group got exactly two laps on the ’75. Two laps back to back with a 2025 Gold Wing Tour.
Looking at the two motorcycles parked side by side outside the spectacular Barber Museum, my reaction was the same one I often have when I see a motorcycle from my youth. “Who shrunk the old bike to seven-eighths scale?” The Gold Wing was definitely considered a big motorcycle in 1975, one of the biggest. But the 2025 looks like a starship by comparison when the two are parked side by side, and the original looks compact, svelte, and more mechanical.
The 2025 boasts Apple CarPlay and Android Auto lighting up its huge full-color screen and communicating with your phone. Two more cylinders, more than 80% more displacement, linked brakes with ABS, fuel injection, traction control, electronically adjustable preload on the rear suspension, heated grips and seats, an electrically adjustable windscreen, a stereo, and an optional automatic transmission, if you want it, is just a partial list of new model’s features that the 1975 doesn’t have, many of which its creators couldn’t even have imagined. Riding the new Gold Wing is an experience. Riding the old one, I knew, would be a rarer experience.
Rolling onto the Barber track for the first time ever on an irreplaceable, 50-year-old borrowed motorcycle gave me pause. Barber is a tricky circuit with more than one blind corner, and “blind” takes on an all-new meaning when I come over a rise on a totally unfamiliar circuit and ride straight into the setting sun. Sending this bike into the gravel trap would be one of the low points of my motorcycle media career, however, so I keep a conservative pace, by track standards, and try to soak in the sensations.
I got exactly two laps on the 1975 on the Barber Motorsports Track. A mere taste of what luxury riding was like 50 years ago. Photo by Mike Emery.
For a motorcycle half a century old, the 1975 felt solid. Naturally, it didn’t have the ultimate-smooth high-tech feel of the 2025. The clutch pull a little heavy, the gear shift lever requiring a firm shove. I missed a few shifts and that’s not counting the times I bumped my toe on the underside of the four-cylinder engine. But the quirks were surprisingly few. It handled like I expected a motorcycle to handle, from the perspective of a quarter of a way into the 21st century. I banked into Barber’s turns with respect for the age of the bike, but not with fear that it couldn’t handle well more than I was asking of it.
Two laps passed very quickly, even though I wasn’t riding that fast.
The most overriding impression, as I stepped off the bike, was the same one everyone else had. Despite the Gold Wing’s disc brakes, which were advanced for its time, we all had the same response. Good brakes just hadn’t really been invented yet back in 1975, had they? To say engine braking was my friend as I rolled into Barber’s corners is an understatement. More like an indispensable ally.
Motorcycles have changed a lot in 50 years.
While others got their two-lap stints, I watched the 1975 go by every couple of minutes and tried to put it into perspective. Honda launched some groundbreaking models into the U.S. market in the 1970s, from the CB750 that ended the 1960s and created the notion of a superbike, to the shock and awe of the six-cylinder CBX at the end of the decade. I remember being with friends at a local bar when I was in college when a guy we knew rode up on a CBX. It was instantly game over. It didn’t matter what the rest of us rode. The CBX’s row of gleaming chromed header pipes stole the show and we were agog. The Gold Wing made a different kind of impression, but a more lasting one, as 50 years of history proves. The pedestrian CB360T I started riding on was the scrawny, pre-teen sibling of the Gold Wing, which was the handsome college graduate with a good job who also happened to be a body builder.
Probably best I don’t know now, for sure, just how bad that first motorcycle of mine was. Best to just be grateful it helped me learn to ride, that I survived the experience, and that it planted the seed. It set me on a course to ride all those motorcycles since. Including, now, one bright blue 1975 Gold Wing I never thought I’d have a chance to ride.
To be honest, automobiles brakes where not all that great in 1975 versus modern standards. There are crossover SUVs today that can outbreak performance cars of 1975. Tires are another area where improves have been made in leaps and bounds.
I owned both those models of Goldwing
The mention of a Honda 360 took me back to my first bike,a 250G5 Honda,and yes, the brakes were wooden and didn’t work when wet, and the frame seemed to be hinged in the middle,but they are great memories…..