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"A small section of parking lot just outside Honda&amp;#039;s Torrance, California headquarters is filling up with motorcycle-industry heavies. Jeremy McGrath and Jeff Tigart are there. Don Canet, an old friend from my Cycle World days, joins a bunch of other fast journalists. Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck mingles with motocross racers. A good 45 riders show up, every one of them eager to flog Honda&amp;#039;s latest around the cones of a parking-lot gymkhana course. It&amp;#039;s an impressive turnout for a bike that stretches itself to reach 55 mph. That&amp;#039;s the charm of the Honda Grom. Two thousand miles away, at Road &amp;amp;amp; Track&amp;#039;s Ann Arbor HQ, there&amp;#039;s an office-wide itch to ride this new 125-cc playbike. In terms of generating workplace buzz, the Grom ranks between Countach and Corvette. Even from a distance, motorheads know a good toy when they see one.  Back in Torrance, I&amp;#039;m starting to worry about taking my turn. It&amp;#039;s been a long time since I&amp;#039;ve tried to talk a motorcycle of any ilk into going fast. Last time I went playbike racing, I wound up with a tire-sized bruise that stretched from thigh to shoulder. Were the stakes not so high, I&amp;#039;d be happy to dawdle around the track, leaving dignity in the car. But there&amp;#039;s a cool Troy Lee-designed lunch box waiting for the winners, and I don&amp;#039;t want to let a bunch of strangers with tattoos and actual riding talent down. Fortunately, team assignments go my way. I draw Canet and another CW vet, Garret Kai, both nice guys, and both more than capable of making up for my deficiencies. The Honda folks politely ask us not to maim ourselves or their friends in view of the legal department, whose offices have a view of the lot where all this is going down. Then they point us toward the bikes for a practice session, fast guys first. I stay out of the way. Good thing. The pit scene soon verges on madness. Motocross guys are doing burnouts and slow-motion wheelies while packed four-wide leading toward the start. The rules for the race are similar to those of a time-speed-distance rally, and the target time for the fast guys has been set by Pikes Peak champ Tigart. Everyone wants to beat it. Getting under Tigart&amp;#039;s time in the race can only hurt your chance at winning, but in the pre-race practice sessions, that fast time is a bullseye and folks are a little wound up.  The speedy guys throw the little bike around, leg out, in flat-track style with the hope of catching a slide should too much weight get shifted from the tiny tires onto the grinding footpeg. Canet quickly gets under his target time; he&amp;#039;ll have to slow down a little for the race. Then we&amp;#039;re up. I ride 10 feet, stop for a photo and then find myself staring down a chute of cones and hay bales. It&amp;#039;s funny to try and imagine your first braking point while on the starting line, revving the motor and waiting to drop the clutch. My first guess wasn&amp;#039;t great. I wimp out and grab a handful of front brake too early going into the first left-hander, then try to make up for my cowardice by pouring on the throttle at the exit. This technique tells me two things. First, the bike has good brakes. Second, the engine is tiny and I should eat less linguini. Mass is not your friend when racing a bike this small. I bulldoze through the course, coming to terms with the 12-inch front wheel and guessing my way through the gearbox. Cones scatter like startled birds. The bike is tons of fun, despite the fact that I&amp;#039;m using it wrong. My first practice is clumsy, but now I&amp;#039;ve seen the course and I&amp;#039;m looking forward to scraping time off my second practice run. That&amp;#039;s when I get the great idea to keep the bike in second gear the whole time. It&amp;#039;s a trick I&amp;#039;ve used in cars when I&amp;#039;ve needed to learn the layout of a track without the added complication of figuring out shift points. It works great in a Corvette.  Not so much, it turns out, with the eight or so horsepower I have at my command on the Honda. I learn the course, and smooth out my lines, but my lap time is identical. My friend Katie, patiently minding the stopwatch, looks amused. &amp;quot;At least you&amp;#039;re consistent,&amp;quot; she says. I have to satisfy myself with that as I hand my practice bike off to another rider. Going into the race I&amp;#039;ll be pushing as hard as I can to approach my target time. It could easily lead to some more cone killing, a surefire way to chalk up penalties and doom any chance of winning. We decide on a team strategy. Kai will run first and I&amp;#039;ll take second. Kai will then hand off his bike, now with warm tires, to Canet, who will anchor the operation. It&amp;#039;s a good plan. Kai and I make our runs and we&amp;#039;re well within our envelope: clean, no toppled cones, and both faster than we were in practice. Canet comes blasting through the finish line, and the nice lady with the stopwatch laughs: 57.54 seconds. It&amp;#039;s just half a second slower than his target time, using only his intuition as a timer. Canet is a machine. The legal department has started to assemble on a shady lawn to watch the spectacle. Someone brings a cowbell. Our team settles into first place, and I start to seriously desire one of those lunch boxes. It&amp;#039;s not to be. Despite more good riding from my teammates, we start to suffer at the hands of better guessing. Other teams crank out impossibly accurate and clean runs that eventually bump us back to fifth. Our second team outing is only good enough to land us temporarily in third. &amp;quot;Still a podium!&amp;quot; we&amp;#039;re congratulating ourselves. Then one of the last teams to run bumps us to fourth. Damn. Consolation lunch boxes for us. The win goes to the team of Jeremy McGrath and LAPD boss Charlie Beck. I&amp;#039;d claim it was an inside job, but Beck&amp;#039;s talented on a bike.  Some things were learned about the little Honda along the way, and that&amp;#039;s what we were there for after all. The only real question was ergonomic: I wanted to know if my gawky 5&amp;#039;11 frame could get comfortable on 47.4-inches of wheelbase. The answer is yes, very much so. A long, broad seat gives the leggy plenty of seating options, even if a tallish man on a smallish bike looks exactly as silly as you&amp;#039;d imagine. A couple hours of flailing and railing on the little 125 only instilled more want. We could go over specs and performance figures, but that&amp;#039;s a waste. They&amp;#039;re low enough to be irrelevant. The Grom is tiny, gutless, slow, and perfect. It&amp;#039;s the kind of motorcycle that probably made you enjoy riding in the first place. Invariably, it&amp;#039;ll make you enjoy riding again. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/first-drives/reviews/a5330/2014-honda-grom-first-ride/>