’95 CBR900RR-S

HONDA had always stuck with two-yearly major updates on its bikes. With the 1994 machine so patently right, it simply rested on its laurels, content to modify some of the paint and logo details and make the sidestand more stable, too.

For these modest changes, you were asked to pay an extra £100 as the list price rose to a fairly hefty £8295. But the demand was so irrepressible the firm could probably have asked for £1000 and it would still have been turning away customers the production lines couldn’t satisfy.

And it wasn’t much more in monetary terms than the opposition – the ageing Yamaha FZR1000EXUP, the bulbous-looking GSX-R1100WS, and Kawasaki’s capable, but lardy ZX-9R, which had been introduced the year previously to take over from the GPZ900R, whose 1980s heyday was now well in the past.

The FireBlade was much more in performance terms, comprehensively slaying the opposition yet again, and most buyers weren’t yet put off by the looming shadow of one of British biking’s biggest black clouds over the last few years – the meteoric rise in insurance premiums.

It wasn’t just new bikes that buyers were drooling over behind the plate-glass windows of showrooms, either. By now, a buoyant secondhand market existed and used Blades were selling for between £4500 and £7000, depending on their year and condition.

Today, as with the 1994 machine, £2700 to £3500 will get you a more than decent one.