At the 2017 edition of the Bangkok International Motor Show, Honda Thailand took the wraps off a new concept bike called the 150SS Racer. Now the company has revealed absolutely no details on this bike, but it looks more like a design exercise to flesh out future ideas rather than form the direct basis of an upcoming production bike.
Looking at its proportions, one is instantly reminded of the Husqvarna Vitpilen, thanks to its minimal, futuristic café racer styling, though its size tends to gravitate a bit towards something like the Honda Grom, but it’s not entirely as small. It gets a sculpted fuel tank sitting atop massive radiator shrouds that endow the bike with a veneer of premiumness. Its café racer looks come from a stubby tail section, low slung handlebars (not clip-ons though) and a proper retro-style round headlamp. There’s also a large empty space under the seat and a transparent panel along the rear subframe which lends this 150SS Racer a sense of lightness, although no figures have been officially revealed.
The premium design touches don’t end there either. There is liberal use of carbon fibre across the bike, from the fenders to the entire wheel discs. And in truly high-tech fashion, it also gets two on-board cameras, one under the seat facing back and a forward-facing one under the instrument cluster. With no built-in display, we can always imagine the cameras feeding images directly into a futuristic rider’s helmet. Apart from that, it gets chunky upside down forks up front, radially mounted front brake calipers and a stubby megaphone exhaust, all signalling to its performance potential.
There’s absolutely no word on the engine, apart from the fact that it’s a 150cc single-cylinder mill that’s liquid cooled. It might be safe to assume that this is a modified version of the motor from the Honda CBR 150R which is sold in Asian markets.
As a pure design study at this stage, there are no plans of making a production bike based on the 150SS Racer. But it could certainly serve as inspiration for low-capacity high-performance naked bikes that Honda might want to bring to Asia in the future.
Azaman Chothia
Vishal Venugopal
