KAWASAKI Z
Power corrupts; lack of power corrupts absolutely.' The dictum of lord Acton may be more famous, but this parody of it by Adlai Stevenson is more telling - not least to the superbike rider, wether the feel contempt or compassion for the pilots of the tiddlers and mopeds that parade their disturbing humility on the roads of which his mount makes him master. Lack of power makes a motorcycle fatuous, embarrassing and dangerous, but it is a lack that no Kawasaki on the road ever need suffer. After the best part of a century of trying hard, since Shozo Kawasaki founded a dockyard in Tokyo, Kawasaki Heavy Industries are big and powerful, versed in the technology of locomotives, supertankers , aircraft and what not; and when they created a Motorcycle Division in 1968 , they envisaged products that would in their own way be big and powerful.
What they did not envisage was that the highly refined four-cylinder four stroke that they had planned was also a design objective of Honda, a firm then nearly twenty years old and with nearly ten million motorcycles already built. Even before the Kawasaki motorcycle division was formed , key designers had schemed a 750cc engine; but the public announcement of the CB 750 Honda sent them scurrying back to shelter. A review of their objectives showed that the Kawasaki motorcycle , when it appeared, would have to be bigger and better than the Honda, and practical trials of their rival soon showed that although making a bigger one might not be difficult , making a better on would be far from easy. Time was not necessarily against them : Honda's lead could be exploited for , as the first of new generation of elaborate hight power roadsters, and one for which long term success seemed assured, it could be left the unwelcome task of breaking the commercial ice, of finding and capturing a market that could then be relatively easily seduced by Kawasaki when they were good and ready. In the meantime a diversion - or was it a counter- irritant? - was necessary, and it did not take long to produce one. The three cylinder HI Kawasaki, marketed as the Mach 3 , was a more or less dirigible fire cracker with a perpetually short fuse, an incorrigible and intemperate half litre two stroke that instilled respect among onlookers and put the fear of God into its riders.
Once this line of two strokes had been started , and for that matter extpolated down into morphologically similar threes of rather smaller capacity and even greater thirst, there was no incentive to stop their production when eventually Kawasaki were ready with the mild mannered four stroke that was the most powerful ( and in some circumstances the most abstemious) of them all.
In fact when Kawasaki introduced their four stroke four cylinder Z1 model in 1973 they were not ready for the tremendous impact it made upon the motorcycle world. That world was not ready for the Z1 either, flabbergasted to find that its engine displacement was no less than 903cc , incredulous when inspection proved that from its double overhead camshafts to its elaborate built up crankshaft, and taking into account all the effulgent furniture between, the Z1 was not only clearly meant to outdo Honda, but at least in some respects had succeeded. the Z1 was an instant success, so much so that the Kawasaki factory in Akashi was at first embarrassed by the heavy demand. The machine had been under development , with riders hammering it privily across America as well as around Japan , since 1967; but not until 1973 was well under way did a new engine factory come on stream to increase the flow of production and diminish the turbulence of impatient customers.
Whatever the discrepancy between supply and demand , the Kawasaki publicity machine did not hesitate to promote this extravagant machine in a fittingly extravagant way. Soon motorcycling journalists all over America and Europe were unleashing torrents of superlatives with which to convey their astonished admiration of the Z1 in general and of its engine in particular. In this particular, their superlatives were amply justified : the engine was rated at no less than 82bhp at 8500rpm, but its exemplary mechanical smoothness was backed by an astonishing flexibility and lack of temperament. There was power available at tick over speed, power that became simply and steplessly more almighty as the revolutions rose. The gearbox was a five speeder, with top gear high enough to have true overdrive characteristics ; yet the engine was so grandiloquent in torque that the machine could be ridden quite purposefully in town traffic in that same top gear. With such a superfluity of urge, the performance was at once sensational and predictable, with a maximum speed of 132mph and acceleration such as would encompass a standing quarter mile in 12.5 seconds. its strength was ferocious, yet this was the most civilised engine ever to propel a motorcycle. Its four silencers kept the exhaust noise down to a whisper most of the time, suffering it to rise only to a hollow baritone moan when the four throttles where open and the revs where high . A positive crankcase ventilation system reduced pollution by reducing blow by gases and thus minimising hydrocarbon emissions, while specially hardened sintered alloy valve seats allowed the use of lead free petrol, so that the exhaust would be even more sanitary. Add to this the fact that the relatively low compression ratio allowed the burning of cheap low grade fuel, and the ambivalence of this paralysing powerful and apologetically innocuous engine became even more extraordinary.
Inevitably there were special stunts staged to give the propaganda extra impact. A fairly standard Z1 , admittedly very carefully prepared but modified only in the handlebars and riding position. the removal of indicators and replacement of the rear suspension units , ran for 24 hours around Daytona speedway at an average speed of 109.64mph, including fuel stops and maintenance checks. this was admittedly only 0.36% better that the R69s B.M.W. had achieved around the Montlhery bowl back in 1961; but the B.M.W. was much more comprehensively modified , especially in the engine. In the high temperatures prevailing in Florida, the Kawasaki demonstration was one of convincing reliability. What could be done when the engine was modified was shown at the same track at about the same time: a Z 1 with the engine tuned to deliver more than 100bhp set a new 160.28 mph record, which left no one in any doubt about the progress made in a dozen years.
Impressive as these demonstrations were, they were not entirely convincing because the banking of the Daytona speed bowl made them tantamount to straight line operations . It was nice to know that the Z1 was directionally stable at high speeds , but there is more to the high performance motorcycle than that. The journalists had been a little mealy mouthed about the Kawasaki's handling, which was not at all bad at ordinary speeds but grew unimaginable if the rider attempted to use all the available performance on devious roads. Only gradually did the realisation dawn that the Z1 was also sensitive to tyres: the Japanese Dunlop at the front was specially designed for it , and attempts to substitute something with more wet weather grip than the Japanese tyres were then able to muster generally foundered in a storm of bad handling and language to match. Finally there was some dissatisfaction with the braking: the huge single disc at the front was quite effective at hight speeds but hard work when going more slowly , yet it was not until late 1975 that the arduous task of arresting this high speed 500 pounder was eased by duplicating the disc.
Despite all this , Kawasaki were able to advertise competition successes galore but while the engine was undoubtedly a winner, it seldom achieved much in the standard frame. In featherbed chassis related to the Dresda, or slung beneath the large diameter spinal tube of a Egli skeleton, the Z1 was immensely successful in long distance racing , notably in the hands of the French - Swiss pair Georges Godier and Alain Genoud who completely dominated the Coup d'Endurance in the European seasons of 1973 and 1974. at menues as different and as difficult as Barcelona, Spa, and Le Mans. For the 1975 season they acquired an even more special chassis , much of which was based on space frame concepts of triangulation, especially in the critical area around and behind the steering head and in the cantilever - sprung rear forks. The design of this frame was masterminded by Pierre Doneque and Michel Lambert, university lecturers in engineering and design, in consultation with the riders who knew from their experience that rapidity of pit-stops was of crucial importance in long distance racing . In the 1975 Bol d'Or one of the Kawasaki riders came in after only 2 of the 24 hours had passed , having dropped the plot. The fairing was smashed the lights and footrests badly damaged and the engine was firing on only two cylinders. Two of the machines three mechanics attacked the aircraft fasteners attaching the fairing while the other jerked open the two rubber fasteners that secured the complete tank and seat assembly with its integral battery and electricity centre. New complete units, hanging on the pit walls amid a rich profusion of costly spares were clipped into place as quickly as the original ones had been ripped off. The machine was out again within two minutes...
Godier and Genoud won the 1975 Bol d'Or almost as conclusively as they had in 1974 and the factory's advertising people made no bones about treating it as a Kawasaki victory .