Red Honda GL 1500 Gold Wing from 1988, six cylinders, 1520 cc, 100 HP, five speeds
The Honda Gold Wing is a series of touring motorcycles manufactured by Honda. Gold Wings feature shaft drive and a flat engine.
4th generation. GL1500 (SC22)
A new design team began work on the fourth-generation Gold Wing in 1984. Honda describes prototype testing as involving sixty developmental stages, and building fifteen different test bikes, including one made from a GL1200 frame coupled with the original M1 engine so that a six-cylinder could be compared to a four-cylinder head-on. This early ’70s prototype had an influence far beyond what the M1’s initial designers could have expected.
New Gold Wing engine design goals were smoothness, quietness and enormous power. Ultimately, a redesigned Gold Wing made its debut at the 1987 Cologne Motorcycle Show, 13 years after the original GL1000 was first shown to the public at the same venue, and the GL1500 brought the most changes seen to the Gold Wing series since its inception. The biggest difference was that the flat-four engine was replaced with a flat-six engine. Although the GL1500 still used carburetors, there were just two large 36 mm CV Keihins supplying all six cylinders, the first time any Gold Wing had less than one carb per cylinder.[
