Well, that didn’t take long. Speculation about a new offering from Honda sporting the same 1,084cc parallel twin found in the Africa Twin and Rebel 1100 has been rampant. Japanese magazine Young Machine (which we aren’t totally convinced isn’t a front for Honda’s design team) even published some speculative renders of what the new bike could look like earlier in February, 2022.
Fast-forward to Friday, February 25, 2022, and Honda just made its existence official by dropping this teaser image of the upcoming Hawk 11. It’s set to premiere worldwide at the 2022 Osaka Motorcycle Show, which runs from March 19 through 21. Team Red also released a short, 25-second teaser video for the Hawk 11 exclusively on one of its Japanese-language websites. It plans to release a second teaser video sometime between now and March 19, as well.
The teaser image and single video that Honda has published so far show an extreme right front closeup of the headlight, cowl, and turn signal of the bike. The images are dark and mysterious, which is usually the way of teasers. The House that Soichiro Built is also purposely keeping any and all-important spec information close to its chest ahead of the launch. It’s totally what’s expected, but will that also be the case with the design once it’s unveiled?
How similar does Honda’s official Hawk 11 teaser look to Young Machine’s speculative render from earlier in the month? The small bit we can see in the teaser features similar lines. The round LED headlight in Honda’s teaser image looks less recessed in the cowl than YM’s render. However, that could also be an optical illusion since it’s illuminated in that official teaser, and not drawn that way in the speculative render.
What about potential changes to the engine? Honda’s brief paragraph of descriptive text about the Hawk 11 seems to talk about the importance of styling, and also about a bike not being judged by its specifications alone. To us, that makes it seem likely that not much will shift in the powerplant department for this model. Will it end up replacing the CB1000R? That remains to be seen.
Honda plans to make a showing at all three major Japanese motorcycle shows announced so far for 2022: Osaka, Tokyo, and Nagoya. If you’ll be around those areas and are interested in attending, tickets are currently on sale via a special Honda website, which we’ll link in our Sources.
