TWO FACES HAVE I

The smallest of Japan’s Big Four motorcycle manufacturers has always punched above its weight. For half a decade following its release in 1973, the Z1 and its variants was king of the heavyweights, stunning its rivals into lifting their game to regain market share in the top sales segment. But lift they did, and by the late 1970s the old air-cooled Kawasaki was showing its age, looking a bit portly, and not quite the rocket ship it had once been.

Across in Japan, the Big K’s designers were continuing to churn out concepts, but transferring these into metal was another thing. By 1982, Kawasaki’s motorcycle division, which was and is a very small part of the industrial giant’s operations that include fixed wing aircraft and helicopters, trains, industrial robots and ships, was losing money, both in its home operation and the American subsidiary. But far from pulling back, Kawasaki’s answer was to attack, with the primary aim of increasing its share of the home market (the world’s largest) significantly beyond the modest two per cent it held in 1982. To this end, a plethora of new models was planned, from the svelte tandemtwin KR250 (based on the company’s all-conquering Grand Prix bikes), to the new king of the range, the GPz900R (with 550 and 750 cc sub-models).

The GPz900R owed nothing to the Z1 ancestry apart from the fact that it had a wheel at each end. Unveiled to the world’s motorcycle press in December 1983, the GPz900R immediately proved faster than both the existing GPz750 Turbo and the top of the range GPz1100, both of which were based on the old 2-valve Z1 concept. The 900 was completely new, with water cooling for the 4-valves per cylinder DOHC engine, which was employed as