Honda RC30 Built by Jim Granger - Poster

When the new World Superbike Championship was introduced in 1988, Honda had an issue as its highly successful custom-built RVF750 factory endurance racer (not the RC45) wouldn’t be eligible to compete. So they set out to create a new top-shelf, street-legal, limited edition race bike, producing the minimum number of units required to satisfy homologation rules. Knowing it would only have to turn out a relatively small batch of machines, Soichiro Honda wanted to use the new model to demonstrate what its factory race department was capable of. The result was a no-expense-spared race-grade legend brimming with features previously reserved for track-only machinery. Japan called it the VFR750R, but the bike we fell in love with in America was named the RC30. Jim Granger originally acquired the bike around 1990. During that time, he also purchased a lightly built stock engine (the one currently installed) from Ray Plumb when he was with American Honda. In 2013, Jim and his son, Russ, campaig