New Blackbird (VTEC)

[t-c]

As some of you might know, I have my own column in a National Motorcycle Mag (not EMAP).

Well today a press release has just dropped onto the mat confirming that the VTEC Blackbird is being launched this year contrary Honda saying at the bike show that it was being put on the back burner until 2005 at least.

I have been asked to go to the launch, which will probably be Spain, but nothing more specific at the moment. It will be an interesting comparison to ride the new Bird after 200,000+ miles on the carb and injected birds.

Anyway, if you are interested I will keep you posted

[DennisTheMenace]

Please do t-c , It will be interesting to see if the car based v-tec works on the bike , i like the new VFR but im put off by the servicing costs of the v-tec system

[dern]

When you say works, what do you mean? I had a prelude VTEC for 3 years and initially the kick in the back was great. After a while though it really started to annoy me and I started to view the bottom half of the rev range as a damn great hole in the power. I can see why they do this for cars... basically, I assume, to get better fuel economy lower down in the rev range while providing a fair bit of power at the top. I guess if you tune the whole engine for power fuel economy would suffer because of the engine capacity. On a bike the whole weight is much much smaller and I've found that my fireblade gives just as many miles to the gallon (more or less) when thrashed as compared to when trundled along. There is no way I'd trade off low end power (such as it is) for better fuel economy. A more acceptable alternative would be to provide a standard state of tune at lower revs and then *more* than standard at higher revs but from the figures I've seen they didn't do that for the vtec vfr. Would you trade low end power (which most people complain there isn't much of anyway) for better fuel economy but reduced responsiveness at lower revs?

Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

Cheers,

Mark

PS. I haven't ridden a vtec bike so this is pure speculation.

[ninjaboy]

I think the idea of v-tec is to use two valves per cylinder at low rpm for more torque and then switch to 4 per cylinder at high rpm for more power.I have never driven a v-tec car so i can't coment really the prelude has a very high power/litre output so it would probably be worse without v-tec.

[dern]

ninjaboy said:

I think the idea of v-tec is to use two valves per cylinder at low rpm for more torque and then switch to 4 per cylinder at high rpm for more power.I have never driven a v-tec car so i can't coment really the prelude has a very high power/litre output so it would probably be worse without v-tec.

I think there are different flavours of vtec to get the different effects so I understand what you're saying. Certainly be interesting to have a go but still smitten with the blade 3 years on so it would have to be fantastic to tempt me from that.

Regards,

Mark

[FunkyNige]

ninjaboy said:

I think the idea of v-tec is to use two valves per cylinder at low rpm for more torque and then switch to 4 per cylinder at high rpm for more power.

That's what's currently on the bikes; the car VTEC (the system to be used on the new bikes) effectively has 2 cam profiles - at high revs the engine switches to the more aggressive cam.