STRAIGHT-LINE KING OF BIKES

IT WAS BIG, FAST, BRIGHT RED, AND THE HEAD OF motorcycling’s most exciting family. It was one of the fastest and most powerful street bikes the world had ever seen. It could even be described as one of the first super-nakeds, three decades before the term was invented. But the GPz1100 that Kawasaki unleashed in 1981 was also something else ― a dinosaur whose era of supremacy was coming to a close.

Not that the performance-hungry riders of the day realized this at the time. Kawasaki had been building powerful fours with two-valves-per-cylinder air-cooled engines, wind-blown riding positions, and twin rear shocks for eight years, since the Z1 had blasted the firm into every motorcyclist’s consciousness in 1973. Few riders would have guessed that the superbike world was about to change dramatically and that the GPz1100 would be