|
|
|
Striptease Yes, that's me in the lead picture,and I am not doing what you think I am doing. The rain-swept ocean was a great sight all right, but all that I wanted at that moment was our lensman to say cut and take. Let me explain. Schumi was hired to run MotoFocus with an unwritten clause-that he stays away from Kawasakis. But trust the guy to throw me the key to a particularly fast Kawasaki on a particularly drenched day. I could have done away with the big bike pages for this issue by wielding my editorial rights, but that would have been pretty mean to you enthusiasts out there, right?
Lady I said,not girl. The last time I rode a fast Kawi, it was mean and black ZX9R - a hypersport heavyweight bike that looks, sounds and goes like a thunderbolt from hell. Now she was young, pretty and oh boy, quite fast too. The 1100 that way is like someone whom you know for some time, ageing, understanding and eminently adorable. Now take a good look at the bike in the pics-I can already hear ardent believers in Kawasakism telling me that the GPZ is not complete. Sure it is not, the lower fairing is missing,all the loose wires and tubing are tucked neatly in and made to resemble a modern day naked bike. Shh, don't even utter the word retro,for there exists the Eddie Lawson replica ZRX1100 in true green,white and purle racing colours.
The idea was simple. To make a sport tourer with a silky smooth powerplant and tremendous mid-range power. So intake ports were made smaller, cam profile changed, timing altered, smaller 36mm Kehlin CVK carbs retrofitted, and ram-air injection, which produced the raw top-end performance of the ZX11, ditched. Call it retro-engineering but the result was a motorcycle that could outpower its engine donor up to the 4400 rev mark! Truckloads of torque was all right but the Kawasaki boffins went one step ahead and created what is reagarded even today as the smoothest lire-plus motorcycle engine ever built. To keep the vibrations and noise down, a gear-driven counterbalancer was added, while the countershaft sprocket cover and the clutch cover were thickened.
It was a good motorcycle and as refined a sport tourer you could get. Every European road tester who rode the bike returned it with a big smile and at least a four star rating. But the bike bombed. It lost its way amongst established touring bikes like the Yamaha FJRs, Honda ST1100s, and of course, those all conquering BMWs. It was not appreciated the way Kawasaki thought it would be, and faded by 1997. The bike that you see in these pages is a '96 version which got the naked treatment-in all probability after a low-siding incident. Don't know what you think, but I love the way it looks now, without those garish GPZ stickers. If you want to know how Kawasaki would have done it if they had to create a half-faired sports tourer, take a look at the 2001 spec ZRX1200S, and hope that BSM will atleast get to test it some day soon. For the time being, let me take you for a quick, wet spin in the GPZ1100.
This motorcycle was meant to cover lots of road in quick time and the near upright seating position is suited just for that. The silky smooth engine understands thais and builds power roughly from 2800 rpm onwards, all the way to the 11,000 terror line without any interruption. No lag, no searching for power at the higher echleons of the rev counter...it is there for you to enjoy in almost all gears, all through the band. If you are one of those who need cold numbers to be convinced, then the 109 bhp at 9500 rpm may not sound much but what it does is to download 9.2 kgm of raw torque at 6750 rpm. Better still, it will provide you a succulent sweet spot between 3800 to 9600 rpm, where all of 8.2 kgm is yours to munch. In short, if you try catching it in town or anything this side of an R1, the GPZ rider will smoke you the way he would have done with the original ZX11. What it lacks however is involvement in the form of glorious exhaust notes and the sensation of speed that comes with it. Nothing that a pair of aftermarket pipes cannot cure-but again that beats the purpose.  Understatement is the name of the game
here, you see. If you are looking for a Kawasaki that could split your
retina with its speed and a few eardrums in the process, the ZX9R is more
like it. The downside of all that smoothness is that you really don't
realise the kinds of speeds you are doing-80 kph feels like 60, and 150
kph more like 120 and so on. Now that means you have to pay attention to
that speedo needle more often.
The 1100 lets you cruise in sixth gear at around 80-100 kph and feels quite safe while at it. Thanks to the refinement on offer, you can do it all day long,safe in the knowledge that the mammoth four-potter leisurely spinning at around 3700 rpm is capable of much more than that. While I would have expected any engine derived from a ZX11 to have enough performance, what came as a surprise was how rideable it was in city traffic. The riding position is almost upright but racy enough for the tag of a sport tourer. Riding her in pouring rain, I encountered terrain that would have made an Africa Twin happy,yet the traditional forks up front soaked up the potholes admirably. At the rear, the GPZ features Kawasaki's UniTrak mono shocker with adjustable spring preload and rebound damping. While the set-up of the test bike was suited for winding roads-or better still, a test track-the ride on offer on bad city roads was superior to the newer breed of sport bikes I have ridden.
So I rode her in town, in the suburbs and spent a good part of the day getting wet. The conditions prevented me from going the whole hog with her but it made me realise why Kawasaki dared building a motorcycle like the GPZ1100. This one was built for real people who wanted to appreciate real motorcycling. It is very quick, reasonably fast and refined all along and you will agree with me that she looks good in its present guise. In the GPZ1100, form dutifully followed function, and still came up with a pretty picture. This was a brilliant effort from Kawasaki in taking the best out of a legend and marrying it with contemporary technology to create an affordable yet magnificent motorcycle....but like some very good ideas,it didn't work well for them. The rain clouds wil be gone next month and I can hear a rumble of a mean,green ZX12 in the horizon. Honour your contract and stay home, Schumi! |
To cut a long one short, I dusted my helmet, organised a rain
jacket and hit the pothole-riddled Mumbai roads with the Kawasaki GPZ1100.
And yes, you guessed it right, the lusty lady that you see in these pages
didn't let me down.
To understand the GPZ better, you should know another great
Kawasaki from the eighties and early nineties. The ZX11. To the
uninitiated, the 11 was the king. The fastest production motorcycle on
Mother Earth in its time and objet de desire of many like me who had
life-size posters of the same on their walls. As the 11 started fading
away, Kawasaki engineers decided to resurrect the GPZ badge from the past
and what better place, than that beefy 1100 motor, to begin
with?
Kawasaki threw away the twin-spar alloy frame of the 11(which
could have made the GPZ far too expensive) and in came a tubular structure
onto which the re-engineered motor was fitted-with a single rubber
mounting up front and two rigid rear mounts. The fairing was advanced for
the nineties and unlike some of the hypersport machines,wind protection
for the rider was considered over top-end performance enhancing
aerodynamics.
Nestling under what is left of the fairing is a futuristic
instrument console,almost like that of an automobile. Speedo and odo take
the centre stage but there are such nice things as a fuel gauge and an LCD
clock. Punch the starter motor and you'll be surprised not to hear that
'distant rumble' you have come to associate with big Kawasakis. Instead,
the four cylinders light up without any drama and settle into an almost
inaudible idle. The smoothness of the motor is incredible and even
wrist-fulls of throttle do not make this one howl. This is the
motorcycling equivalent of a 12 cylinder Jaguar powerplant.
Road tests published in 1995 say that the GPZ1100 needed only
11.09 seconds to dismiss off quarter mile (400 m) and that explains the
'sport' part of the equation better. Mind you, at 242 kg dry, this is no
lightweight machine, and for all that weight, 240 kph is not a bad top
speed at all. While the rain prevented speeds above 150 kph, I had ample
oppurtunity to try those awesome brakes. The test bike featured a pair of
twin-piston Tokicos on 300 mm discs that never saw good use, which meant
crisp bites that helped delete speed like magic. Used in tandem with the
250 mm disc at the rear, you start wondering why BMW took pains in
developing expensive ABS systems.