It is common to deride the 70s as the decade that style forgot, what with flared trousers, huge lapels and man-made fibers in gaudy colors. But it was also a decade of great music, from heavy rock to soul, R&B to disco, not forgetting prog and Glam rock!

The 1970s are also known as the decade when the Japanese swept all before them in motorcycling, hammering in the final nail to the British motorcycle industry and establishing a template for sports motorcycles that remains today. But the Japanese weren’t the only nation creating memorable motorcycles in the 70s: the European and American manufacturers still had a thing or two up their sleeves.

Related: 2022 The Decline of the British Motorcycle Industry, Part 1; BSA

10 Harley-Davidson XR-750 - 1970

Harley-Davidson XR750 Race Bike
Harley-Davidson
The XR750 is the most succcessful factory race bike ever

Iconic, hugely successful (XR-750s won 29 of the 37 AMA Grand National Championships from 1972 to 2008 and has been called the most successful race bike of all time) and as far from production street Harleys as it is possible to get. Ironically unsuccessful when it first appeared due to the iron cylinder heads that made it overheat and break down more often than it finished a race, let alone win.

By 1972, it had aluminum barrels and cylinder heads, and from that point onwards, it was virtually unbeatable. Synonymous with the likes of Mark Brelsford, Cal Rayborn, Mert Lawwill and Jay Springsteen, not to mention Evel Knievel, there are few images more evocative in motorcycling than those of XR-750s power sliding round a turn on a dirt track.

9 Ducati 750 GT - 1971

Ducati 750GT metal flake orange
Ducati
Shot of the first V-twin Ducati, the 750GT

Why the 750 GT rather than the more famous 750 Sport or the 750 Super Sport? Simple, really: the 750 GT was the first Ducati to get the brand new V-Twin engine and is therefore the grandaddy of every single Ducati since that moment. With its wild metal flake paint job, bellowing noise from the Conti mufflers and excellent handling, the 750 GT was the 70s personified, and while the V-twin engine as fitted to the GT didn’t have the famed Desmo valve actuation, the race-prepped 750 GTs that took Paul Smart to an historic victory in the Imola 200-mile race in 1972 did, and thus gave birth to the iconic 750 Super Sport model, and a legend was born.

8 Laverda Jota - 1976

Laverda Jota static shot
Laverda
Laverda Jota in red, facing right

How often is a factory inspired by one of its dealers to create a new model? Laverda had produced the 3C, with 85 horsepower and a top speed of 133 mph. The official U.K. Laverda importers raced the 3C and effectively created a road-going version of their successful race bike by fitting high compression pistons, open exhausts, Dell’Orto pumper carbs and super hot camshafts to the 3C to give it 90 horsepower and a top speed of 146 mph. The people at Laverda took notice and created their own production version, and so the Jota was born, the fastest production motorcycle in the world in 1976. Incidentally, ‘Jota’ is a Spanish dance in 3/4 time, appropriate as the Jota had a three-cylinder engine!

Related: 10 Best Italian Motorcycles

7 BMW R90S - 1973

Picture taken at the AMA Museum in Pickerington, Ohio

BMW’s reputation before (and, indeed, for some time after) the R90S was staid, to say the least. Their motorcycles were beautifully built and reliable but exciting they were not. What they also were not was sporty, nor could you buy one in any color that wasn’t either black or off-white. The R90S changed all that.

All of a sudden, here was a BMW motorcycle that was fast and had a chassis that could easily cope with the power, but that also came with a two-tone paint job, complete with bikini fairing. At a stroke, BMW’s image changed and people were obviously ready for it as, in three years, 17,000 were sold. In 1977, the R100S replaced the R90S but, by that time, BMW was shifting its focus to the fully-faired R100RS touring model: sanity had returned to Munich!

6 Bimota - 1973 onwards

Bimota SB2 studio shot
Mecum Auctions
Bimota SB2 in white and red, facing right

Yes, this list is supposed to be about individual models from the 1970s, but it would be impossible to single out any Bimota as being more important than any other. In the 1970s, the Japanese knew all about building engines, but very little about building the frames to put them in. That’s where Bimota came in.

Founded by three friends, including Massimo Tamburini (the ‘ta’ of Bimota, who would later go on to design the Ducati 916 and MV Agusta F4), Bimota would take Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Yamaha and Ducati engines and build frames around them to make them handle as well as they went. Massively important in motorcycling history as they forced the manufacturers to up their game and learn how to design chassis. Without Bimota, the Honda FireBlade would never have existed and, without the FireBlad...

5 Honda CBX - 1978

Honda CBX static shot
Honda
Honda CBX 1000 in silver, facing right

OK, so there have to be a few Japanese motorcycles in this list, in the cause of fairness. Let’s face it, there could be lots, from the Honda CB750, Kawasaki Z1, Honda Gold Wing, etc, etc, but was anything more unnecessarily over-the-top than the six-cylinder CBX? After arguably creating the concept of the Universal Japanese Motorcycle with the CB750 in 1969, Honda upped the ante in the late 1970s, with the incredible six-cylinder, 1,047cc CBX.

105 horsepower seems tame by modern standards but the smoothness (and sound) of the engine was incredible, even after a decade of four-cylinder Japanese bikes. The rest of the bike was strangely conventional, but the massively wide engine saved it from looking mundane.

4 MV Agusta 750 Sport America - 1975

MV Agusta 750S America stuiod shot
MV Agusta
MV Agusta 750S America in red

Pure exotica as only the Italians knew how to do it. Developed from the 750 S with help from the American importers to make it more appealing to the US market, especially in terms of the styling, bringing it closer to the racing machinery that was still winning Grands Prix races in the early 70s.

Impossibly complicated engine, derived directly from the racing four-cylinder engines, the 750 Sport America cost three times as much as a Honda CB750 which was a lot to pay, even if it could out-perform the Honda. Always exclusive, a total of 1,276 four-cylinder MV Agustas were produced between 1966 and 1978. Honda probably produced that number every day, but we know which we’d rather have!

Related: The 10 Greatest MV Agusta Motorcycles Ever Made

3 Moto Guzzi 850 Le Mans - 1976

Moto Guzzi Le Mans 850 studio shot
Moto Guzzi
Moto Guzzi 850 Le Mans in red

Trust the Italians to do things differently! The Moto Guzzi transverse V-twin engine was like nothing else when it was introduced in the late 60s and remains completely unique to this day (only Honda tried the same layout with the CX500). While the Japanese were building four-cylinder roadsters from 1969-onwards, Guzzi took a leaf from Ducati’s design book and created a modern café racer for its entry into the sports bike category.

Long and low, with a distinctive bikini fairing and clip-on handlebars, the Le Mans 850 was more long-legged touring bike than out-and-out sport bike, although it won numerous races in AMA Superbike in 76 and 77. It soldiered on until 1992 and never really replaced in Guzzi’s line-up.

2 Yamaha XT500 - 1975

The first ‘adventure’ bike before anyone knew what that was. The Yamaha XT500 has become a legendary bike: a large, single cylinder thumper engine in a rugged yet lightweight frame and tall suspension, with decent comfort and excellent performance, perfect for the riding conditions on the West Coast of America.

It was so much more than style over substance, mind you. The President of Yamaha France saw, in the XT500, the perfect motorcycle to tackle the first ever Paris Dakar rally in 1979, an horrendously difficult and dangerous 6,000-mile race across the Sahara Desert in North Africa. The XT took first and second places and the legends of both the race and the motorcycle were sealed.

1 Honda CB750 - 1969

Honda CB750 studio shot
Honda
Honda CB750 in red, facing right

Even though it debuted in 1969, the Honda CB750 had such an impact on and influence over everything that came afterward in the 70s, and that is why we just had to include it here. Some have called it the most important motorcycle ever made, and in terms of what it started and what we are riding today, they may be right. It was the first modern ‘superbike,’ laying down a template that is still being followed today.

It was the first Japanese bike that had the British industry running scared on its home territory, and while it wasn’t solely responsible for the downfall of that industry, it showed what a motorcycle could be: reliable, smooth, clean and fast: everything the British bikes by that time weren’t. If it wasn’t the first transverse four-cylinder motorcycle (that accolade goes to MV Agusta and the plug-ugly 600 of 1966), it was the one that introduced the concept of the affordable four-cylinder motorcycle. A true icon and legend.