The bike you see in these pictures is the Kawasaki GPz 1100, one of the fastest bikes twenty years ago. But if you were to compare it to a litre machine today, it would come across as a fast lorry. Where a litre class machine would be lost without its quota of space age materials and rev-mad motors today, back then you needed at least a litre of transverse four developing around 100 horsepower, 250 kilos of metal and a wheelbase of about 5 feet to qualify for the fast lorry club. Also, horsepower wasn’t all that it is made out to be and bikes were tuned for usable powerbands. Displacement and not its consequence was the holy grail back then.
Since its introduction, the Suzuki GS1100 had been lording it over the class of ’80 and it represented the ultimate in high speed haulage. With the CBX morphed into a sport tourer for 1981, the CB900F took over as Honda’s 1000cc entry. Yamaha was busy making some awesome two strokes that were still pulling the pants off big capacity motorcycles, and couldn’t be bothered about the four strokers. And while Kawasaki had struck gold with the epic Z1 in ’72, all they had at the end of the decade was a Z1000H, basically an evolved Z1 that looked very like any other Thou. The H wasn’t exactly a giant leap forward, but it did pave the way for the GPz1100 series, which was kicked off in ’81 with the B1 model.
As a descendant of Kawasaki’s high-performance heritage, the GPz took the Z-1 concept further and the one you see here came out a year later, replete with a mini-fairing, inside which lurked a revised set of instruments that included some LCD gauges, the last word in space-age technology in those days!
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