What kind of restraint does it take to keep your extremely collectible bike inside its crate for decades? Every so often, we’re forced to ask ourselves that question, especially when we see something like this 1998 Honda Dream 50 that’s about to go up for auction. If this motorbike was an action figure, it would be considered “new in box.” (Aren’t bikes—with all their moving parts, and their motors that aid in your general perambulation—action-y enough? I digress.)
Anyway, this very big box that’s just teeming with Team Red goodness was a very special single-cylinder commemoration of Honda’s 50th anniversary. It was a Japan-only bike, and sold for two years only—1997 and 1998. The Honda Dream 50 paid homage to Honda’s 1962 CR110 race bike, a 50cc, four-stroke single. At the time, Soichiro Honda was dead-set against two-strokes, a fact well-documented in many histories you’ll read about the time. Unfortunately, this worked to Honda’s detriment with this bike, as two-strokes quickly left it in the dust.
Still, if you’re lucky, mistakes are merely lessons you need to learn—and as the world now knows in 2022, Honda took both its good and its bad experiences in stride, steadily learning and growing the whole time. Thus, the Dream 50—which was both a bit of nostalgia packaged in a beautiful red frame, and also a potent reminder of how far Honda had come in the past five decades.
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This particular example is about to go up for auction via Artcurial on March 18, 2022, at Salon Rétromobile in Paris, France. It’s being offered with no reserve, but is expected to fetch anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 Euros (roughly between $5,649.50 and $11,299) when all is said and done. It’s not clear if there are any Dream 50s that are still new-in-crate other than this one, so in that sense it may very well be one-of-a-kind.
With that in mind, if you were the new owner, would you unbox it or leave it as-is? Generally speaking, most of us here at RideApart are of the opinion that bikes should be ridden—but that’s a tough call.
