Colove’s Excelle 400RR Revives the 400cc Four

Admin · February 18, 2022

Superbike tech in a compact four-cylinder package? New sketches from Chinese firm Colove show the 400RR, a 400cc streetbike which may be under development. (Colove/)

The economic high of Japan’s “bubble era” resulted in the development of some of the most astounding motorcycles ever to reach showrooms, ranging from the oval-piston Honda NR750 to jewellike 250cc four-cylinder sportbikes, but the generations of four-cylinder 400cc machines that appeared at the time were a real highlight. Honda’s CBR400RR and VFR400R, Yamaha’s FZR400, Suzuki’s GSX-R400, and Kawasaki’s ZXR400 sculpted a generation of riders, offering superbike tech in miniaturized packages. Today they’re increasingly collectable, and emissions rules that stack the cards against high-revving, small-capacity engines mean they’re a hard act to recreate under modern legislation. Hard, but not impossible; Kawasaki’s Asia-only ZX-25R is the first new 250cc four-cylinder streetbike in decades and is expected to spawn a 400cc derivative in the future, and now Chinese brand Colove is also getting in on the action.

Related: 250cc Four-Cylinder Sportbikes Of The 1990s Revved To 19,000 rpm

The bike presumably will run Colove’s in-house-designed 400cc four-cylinder engine, said to be good for 72 hp. (Colove/)

Colove, which also appears to go under the name Kove, sells its bikes under the Excelle name in China and showed its new 400cc four-cylinder engine late last year, with claimed performance figures of 72.4 hp at 13,500 rpm and 32.4 pound-feet of torque at 12,000 rpm. The redline doesn’t arrive until 16,000 rpm. That power figure puts the engine significantly above the best of the old Japanese 400cc fours of three decades ago—most of them peaked at around the 60 hp mark. That’s largely thanks to a very high compression ratio of 13:1 and an extremely oversquare bore and stroke, at 59.0mm x 36.5mm, to give the engine its high-revving character. The engine itself is designed entirely in-house rather than being the sort of reverse-engineering project that Chinese firms are infamous for.

Preliminary sketches of the 400RR show Ducati and MotoGP design influences, as in the frame, swingarm, and paint choice. (Colove/)

The aforementioned engine was run in front of an audience recently, during a presentation of the company’s future plans that also included the first drawings of the bike it will be fitted to. That machine, the 400RR, features a trellis-style frame and a single-sided swingarm that, along with the red paintwork chosen for the sketches, give something of a Ducati feel to the design. It’s far from a copy though; the central air intake between the lights gives it a distinctive snout, and the inevitable winglets are joined underneath it into what appears to be a single wing, rather like the latest Aprilia MotoGP machines.

With a promised weight of less than 353 pounds (160 kilograms), if the Colove 400RR can achieve its claimed power figure, performance should be very impressive. The top speed is said to be over 135 mph, which is more than you could hope for from most of the old Japanese 400cc fours. Whether the engine can meet international emissions standards, notably the tough European Euro 5 limits that have already ended sales of several high-revving 600cc four-cylinder models in that part of the world, remains a significant question however.

Colove also presented other designs under development, like this 800cc adventure-styled 800X. (Colove/)

The 400RR isn’t the only interesting machine due from Colove either. That same presentation also saw the firm reveal sketches of three new 800cc parallel-twin bikes, all using an engine that’s distinctly similar to KTM’s LC8c design. The first, an adventure bike called the 800X, has actually been shown in prototype form already, but the sketches at the presentation showed a rather different style that ditched the show model’s beaklike nose for a more Africa Twin-esque shape with a low-mounted front fender.

This 800R also uses an 800cc parallel-twin engine, but adopts a more naked roadster styling. (Colove/)

Other designs included the 800R, a naked roadster with a hint of Kawasaki Z1000 to its proportions. It appears to use a cast alloy half-frame, rather like the Aprilia RS 660 and Tuono 660′s design, but with a single-sided swingarm. The same engine, frame, swingarm, and wheels also appear on the planned 800RR, a fully faired sportbike project that’s being developed alongside the naked machine.

The also-planned 800RR shares the same engine, frame, and wheels, though it gets the fully faired sportbike treatment. (Colove/)