Grandfather of the Ninja
21,303 miles
Auction ends Sunday
Bidding at $4,250 at time of post
According to Mike from RSBFS, “Here is a bike that should need no introduction. The last of the “He-Man” bikes and the best of the rest as the motorcycling world teetered on the verge of technology overload, the Kawasaki GPz1100 was THE bad boy on the block in the early 1980s.
This bike is very far from rare in terms of production numbers – the only limit was the number that could be shuffled through the showroom floor. Tack 35 years onto that memory, however, and what you have is something that is a bona fide collector in the kind of condition that we see here (nostalgia only helps)…. Read on!
Young Padawan learners take note: Long before the days of liquid cooling, four valve heads, fuel injection, rising-rate single shock rear suspension, upside down forks, big brakes, ECUs or radial tires, motorcycles still existed. They were just a bit more basic than what you know today. The quest for speed still existed, but the answer to most questions was displacement.
Want to create a legacy? Build a bigger bike. Want to sell more bikes? Bore out whatever you have to something larger. Dousing the resulting product in “arrest me – now!” red paint never hurts. Backing it up with the most decent chassis of the day, adding triple disks (a novelty) and capping it with a bikini fairing (oooh, racy!) pretty much made this THE big bore bike to have back when Magnum PI was the hot ticket on TV. “
Seller
This is my 1982 Kawasaki GPZ 1100
Very rare motorcycle.
This is the grandfather of the ninja.
It is in very good condition
Runs extremely well
All lights, blinkers, dash lights etc work
Low miles for the year.
This bike is 42 years old.
It’s titled in my name.
I have to sell because of a job loss.
It will be missed.
It has a header on it and 4 carb set up.
I know it originally came with fuel injection.
I know some of the purists will not approve.It is what it is. I was just happy to get it when I found it. They are almost impossible to find and most enthusiasts know these rarely come up for sale.
The tank is clean. bike has been taken care of and kept in my garage.
Interesting to see the design evolve. Those verticle LCD gauge / idiot lights in the dash, moved to a tank mounted binacle sort of thing. Visually here they look like the same components mounted differently. I had a 1984 GPZ but have never seen the dash on a 1982. So that was interesting for me to see.
The gauges (tach/speedo) are mounted differently but the color/font on the faces looks very much the same as my 1984. So interesting to note the evolution.
Thanks for posting just for the education. Gives me a similiar vibe to walking through the Barber museum to see all the time capsules and study the themes and trends that different OEMs went through.