Before looking at this Honda swingarm itself, it is not necessarily uninteresting to focus on the conditions in which these photos were taken. The photos were taken during the two-day test in Misano. It is the only two-day test during the season, and this is important because manufacturers often bring more items to test than in a single day test, such as in Valencia after the Grand Prix.
At the beginning of September, it was hot, very hot, in the pitlane and this will be important for the explanations to follow…
The pitlane, in fact, is entered through a passage located roughly in its first third. On the right (entering, therefore on the left seen from the track), all the Ducati teams, and at the very end, in box #1, already far away under a blazing sun, the Ducati test team with Michele Pirro. This is obviously not a coincidence...
On the other side, in order, Yamaha, Honda, Aprilia and KTM. Then further on, the Honda test team then Michelin.
The track is open from 9 a.m. to 18 p.m., so, of course, on the first day, there were crowds in front of the boxes, waiting for the resumption of Marc Márquez, from the test of Dominique Aegerter or the last release ofAndrea Dovizioso. Then, as the hours passed, the journalists became rarer, taking advantage of an increasingly hot sun to write their reports on the Kalex aluminum swingarm of the RC213V or its lower fairing completely copied from the Aprilia.
It must be said that attending tests can be a bit unrewarding, with the teams often working behind closed doors, only raising the iron curtain to let a driver do a few laps before closing the box. Under these conditions, some colleagues drop out after the first day, and the majority of others prefer to take advantage of the air conditioning in the press room to follow the times live. We understand them!
All this to explain why on the afternoon of the second day, when these photos were taken, only Simon Crafar (MotoGP.com journalist) and yours truly were still sweating in the pitlane, when the Honda test team sneakily tried this machine.
Ahhh, the Honda test team… Without doubt the hardest team to “spy”!
Made up of Japanese and European technicians, it works completely in a closed box, only raising the curtain to allow people to exit and enter Stefan bradl, each time at the helm of a new evolution. Suffice to say that with its location at the very end of the pitlane, the only possibility of taking photos up close was to run to the box hearing the German driver exit, then to wait for his return while taking a detached look under the unfriendly look from the staff…
“They can come out every half hour with a new frame or a new engine, but even for us it's almost impossible to know” a Michelin fitter told us when he saw us waiting in sweat in front of the closed box.
The HRC had three bikes as far as we know, but many more configurations were tested, with each bike swapping its elements with the others. The subject of this article was the most different prototype compared to the RC213V used until then: with its saddle including the Salad Box and its front air intake, we can say that it foreshadowed the 2023 machine, or even the one used at the end of the year.
But, this time, in the box, it was equipped with a carbon swingarm featuring what appears to be horizontal lateral reinforcements to increase its lateral rigidity near its axis, with an appearance that is reminiscent of the wings of the Ferrari Testa Rossa.
The technicians obviously saw that we were quickly taking two photos and that's part of the game.
We never saw this swingarm again, neither in the box nor on the track, and we don't know if we will ever see it again, but it demonstrates at least one thing: at Honda, it's not because We asked Kalex to make an aluminum swingarm so we abandoned the development of the carbon arm!
With, however, a question after the fact: was it really a new carbon arm or was it simply the usual carbon arm, usually always hidden under its carbon protection? Time will tell us (or you, if you have photographic documents)…
