Features

Ducati 900SS heads Ducati 250 Desmo single If anything can get the heart racing and the blood pounding it’s a big, lusty Italian motorcycle. And they don’t come much lustier than the Ducati 900SS, possibly the ultimate road version of Ducati’s legendary air-cooled L-twin of the 70s. When Nick told me he was rebuilding one…

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1974 Kawasaki Z1A Kawasaki's 903 Z1 is generally credited with inventing the superbike and introducing a new era of affordable, high performance, hi-tech bikes to usher in the heady days of the 70s. True, Honda’s original CB750 had gone before, heralding a sea-change in design and technology, but it was the 1972 Z1 which drew…

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Kawasaki W-series 650 twins In all honesty there are probably enough claims and counter claims behind the models in their various guises to keep a team of modern lawyers in work for a generation. Kawasaki assimilated Meguro around 1960 when the latter fell into financial difficulties. However, to muddy the waters Meguro had previously made…

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Yamaha’s YR3 represents the third and final iteration of the company’s first full-on 350cc sports machine. Back in 1966 it was very evident that Yamaha was rapidly catching a cold when it came to machines over 250cc. Overboring the vertically split engined YDS series was only ever going to be a stopgap measure but for…

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It’s 1972 and the tin roof of the school bike shed is reverberating to a new vibe. The sixteener law has killed the elderly Brit and slightly shabby Jap 250s acquired via countless cold ‘n’ wet paper rounds in favour of mopeds. Naively HMG believes this new anti-youth dictat will condemn kids to an asthmatic,…

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Suzuki RF900 Like last month’s Kawasaki ZX-9R, the Suzuki RF900 was a stop-gap machine which had the right capacity to lure people away from the then-dominant CBR900RR FireBlade, but – alas like the Ninja – it didn’t really slice the old mustard. So what was wrong with it? Nothing if you read the launch reports…

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Moto Guzzi S3 classic Italian motorcycle Italian motorcycles have always been loved for their singular character. Like most Italian design, they have been the result more of passion than a desire for business success. It is only recently that Italian motorcycle manufacturers have enjoyed financial security, and that is ironically largely due to massive foreign…

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A white knuckle ride: Kawasaki 750H2 10 1972 Kawasaki H2 750 All the vices and perverse virtues of its Mach III forerunner in 750cc form. Although no faster than the Mach III 500, it was a shade quicker over the standing-quarter and the difference was enough for it to claim the title of the fastest…

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Kawasaki Z1300 The colossal six cylinder, watercooled Z1300 came along just a year after Honda’s own ‘six’, the CBX. That had been awesome enough but the Zed boasted 15 more horses at 120 bhp! Fierce debate in the bike press was already under way about just how far the Japanese could go in terms of…

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Kawasaki KE175B To misquote George Orwell’s Animal Farm “all trail bikes are equal but some are more equal than others”. If you’ve never ridden a KE175 against any of its peers you’ll probably wonder what on earth we’re on about. However, if you’ve played with 1970s trail irons you’ll already know that Kawasaki’s fairly rare…

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