Motorcycling in 2022 is very much an international business, with OEMs both operating and based in many places. Remember HondaGO? If you don’t, it started as Honda Japan’s own-brand bike rental subsidiary in 2020. Back then, we noted that you could actually rent yourself a CBR1000RR-R Fireblade for a weekend—directly from Honda—by using this service.
If the ability to rent all kinds of new Honda bikes directly from Honda in Japan wasn’t cool enough, by February, 2022, HondaGO announced that it would also rent bike gear. If you live in a tiny Tokyo apartment and you don’t have a ton of space for bulky bike gear, but you’d love to get away on a bike for a weekend, Honda is happy to help!
By March, 2022, HondaGO also proved to be Honda Japan’s official news hub for all the new bikes it planned to bring to the upcoming 2022 Osaka, Tokyo, and Nagoya motorcycle shows. In late February, it posted the first of two video teasers showing shadowy closeup views of the upcoming Hawk 11. To kick off the beginning of March, HondaGO posted the second of its planned Hawk 11 teasers on its website.
With all that in mind, it should be absolutely zero surprise that Honda Japan’s in-house rental service, HondaGO, has posted additional images that bear big, splashy date stamps announcing when the Hawk 11 will finally be unveiled, which is March 19, 2022 (the first day of the 2022 Osaka Motorcycle Show).
Since the Internet is the Internet, and bike fans are bike fans, it should come as even less of a surprise that some intrepid person or persons have completely removed those pesky date stamps from these images, then posted the cleaned-up results online where they’re (of course) spreading like wildfire.
It’s cool, and it’s interesting, but it’s not a leak. Don’t get us wrong; we love leaks! Leaks are fun and exciting, and can yield useful information with that elusive allure of the forbidden! However, in this case, Honda Japan—via its HondaGO bike rental website, which has been in operation for the past two years—simply sought to continue stoking interest in the Hawk 11’s impending launch. There’s no mystery here, and anyone trying to tell you otherwise is simply making things up.
