Manufacturers are people. We tend to forget that. I am as in love with Honda's 1970s motorcycles as anyone could possibly be. But I am also a realist. More than fifty years in powersports service, with almost 15 years at the OEM corporate level, has convinced me that while we can venerate a manufacturer--or all of powersports--we need to keep it in perspective. Manufacturers screw up. Not as much as the aftermarket parts world wants you to believe. Listen to them and you'll conclude OEMs do nothing right. But they do mess up.

Do you really think Honda set out to create a bike (the CBX1000) whose cylinder head temperature reaches a documented 500 degrees F? "Oh, crap! Well, too late now." How about advocating in the manual to put thread locker on fork damper rod bolts? Incredibly stupid. Or the shameful first-generation V4 debacle and blaming so much of it on the dealers? Deceitful. Are these things evidence of faultless engineering? Is a company, by dint of it being a company, comprised of a lot of people, immune to making mistakes? Of course not.

The point is, it's individuals who make these kinds of decisions. They weren't the product of committees. Individuals empowered by large corporations. Humanity. The professional mechanic then, instead of jumping to conclusions about how the aftermarket can overcome product deficiencies--which they seldom actually can--he instead strives to make the parts of the machine work the best they can. That is, to the very limit of their design potential. I call this "supertuning". It could also be called blueprinting. But whatever it's called, it is characterized by a humble respect for what Honda did or was trying to do.