Road Tests

Suzuki GT185 Describe a motorcycle as delightful these days and you’ll get a strange look. Motorcycles aren’t delightful. They’re awesome, amazing, stunning. But there was a time when the term fitted comfortably into the lexicon of motorcycle terminology. And it fitted Suzuki’s little GT185 two-stroke twin perfectly. It was in the early 70s, when Suzuki…

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Between 1966 and 1972, Italian star Giacomo Agostini won the 500cc world championship as he pleased, with no significant opposition. The MV Agustas he campaigned were nothing like the modern versions produced by the Cagiva group: they were pure-bred racers that had been developed over two decades and had acquired a reputation as exclusive, exotic,…

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Iconic Yamaha FS1-E Last year I was wandering around the autojumble at the Stafford Show with the wife, when we paused in front of a stall selling a bashed and tatty Fizzy as a restoration project, priced at £750. "What is it with the FS1-E?" whispered the missus in my ear; "prices seem to be…

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Kawasaki GT550 Some otherwise great motorcycles of the seventies and eighties were doomed to obscurity simply because they were unable to make a splash when they first appeared. So it was with Kawasaki’s GT550. It was launched in 1983 as a more sober alternative to the intoxicatingly swift GPz550 sportster. It provided the then novel…

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Kawasaki A7SS The street scrambler concept can effectively be seen as a methodology to sell a bike to a sub-set of customers who fancied something a little different from the conventional street machine. Using as many overt references as possible to dirt and desert sled successes, the British factories positively poured bikes, with varying degrees…

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Kawasaki GPZ1100 Few highlights in a career of performance testing motorcycles stand out as vividly as when we were forced by the limitations of space on MIRA’s timing straight to take Kawasaki’s GPZ1100 – completely redesigned and tuned to be the world’s fastest roadster – to the Midland facility’s mile-long straights. On that last day…

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1972 and 1975 Kawasaki H2 and H2C triples Many things have been written about Kawasaki H2s over the years. The majority of articles tell stories of vicious power deliveries, unintentional wheelies and handling that can leave even the most stoic of riders with something to mutter about. And to a certain degree, they’re all true.…

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Kawasaki Z1300 With the launch of its massive six-cylinder Z1300 in 1979, Kawasaki triumphed in showing how Japanese design ingenuity alone could never succeed in overcoming the dynamic necessities of a motorcycle. The late, great Vic Willoughby, technical editor of Motor Cycle, said it best in his description of the factory’s biggest bike of the…

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Honda CB1100F Produced in 1983 for the US and European markets (it was inexplicably not an official UK import), the 1100F had the same air-cooled four-cylinder engine but with less of the hand-crafted attention that made the 1100R so much of a cult bike. Nonetheless, the 1100F offered much of the 1100R’s 140mph performance in…

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Kawasaki H1 500 Kawasaki first proposed a 500cc two stroke triple in the late 1960s, when Japanese manufacturers were making a concerted effort to cater for American tastes in particular. In the US, acceleration was what sold bikes (and cars, for that matter). The 350 Avenger twin was already as fast as most British 650s…

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