Honda rolled out the red carpet for its 50th anniversary celebration. Retired World Champion Wayne Gardner—still fitting comfortably into his early-1990s leathers—leans against the RVF he and Mick Doohan rode to victory in the 1991 Suzuka 8 Hours. Gardner still carries himself like a man who could throw a leg over a motorcycle and win a race. Photo by John Owens.

The RVF, for the few who still remember it, was MotoGP before MotoGP. It was Honda's four-stroke exotic built years before the premier class abandoned two-strokes. In TT-F1 trim, the RVF tipped the scales at a scarcely believable 304 pounds—including its headlights. Back when the FIM weighed every machine through technical inspection, that number bordered on science fiction. Yamaha, in that period, struggled to get their bikes below 355 pounds sans lights.

Suzuka from that era produced stories that almost sound made up: a thin-wall Kawasaki frame that broke when a mechanic dropped it; Honda throwing millions at the RVF only to lose a certain win because of a one-digit fuel-calculation error; and, in 1993, Americans Mike Hale and Scott Zampach making a row of factory RVFs look silly by qualifying an air-cooled Kawasaki Zephyr-based bike ahead of them.