There are no points for second place. Unbeknownst to Kawasaki and Honda, both manufacturers were developing the Next Big Thing in the 1970s, an affordable, reliable, inline four-cylinder motorcycle displacing 750cc’s. Unfortunately, Honda’s CB750 was first to market by several months, leaving Kawasaki with the unenviable choice: be the also-ran, or delay their machine to…
Update 12.12.2017: Seller confirms this bike has sold. Congratulation to the new owner! -dc Kawasaki pushed out more than 17,000 Z1-Rs over the model’s three-year life, but the majority were built in ’78 and ’79, and the vast majority of those wore Stardust Silver paintjobs. Today’s featured bike bucks both those trends: It is a…
If you replace or heavily modify every single component of a motorcycle, does it become something entirely new? That’s kind of the philosophy at work behind the Muzzy Raptor, a thoroughly massaged version of Kawasaki’s ZX7RR built by tuner extraordinaire, Rob Muzzy. That might sound like the stage name of an 80s glam rocker, and…
As the fall riding season winds down on the East Coast, the sportbike market has tightened up, with the year’s choicest machines long since spoken for or mothballed for another shot at a big sale come spring. There still are some gems to be had, though, and this 1996 Kawasaki ZX-7R is one. 1996 Kawasaki…
The early ’80s were a great time to be an enormous Japanese superbike, as Wes Cooley, Kenny Roberts, Freddie Spencer and Eddie Lawson were busy catapulting your fortunes into the stratosphere. The Kawasaki KZ series in particular was enjoying the fruits of Lawson’s labor, as the flat tracker from Upland, California won the AMA Superbike…
In the American idiom, there is no substitution for cubic inches. Kawasaki understood the unmistakable allure of power and created what many regard as the iconic hot rod of the 1970s. And as hard as it may be to see, today’s mega-hyper-super bikes can trace their lineage back to the Z1R. The recipe remains the…
A small-displacement motorcycle with a four-cylinder powerplant like this Kawasaki ZXR250 really makes no practical sense: singles and parallel-twins are simple to manufacture, inexpensive to maintain, easier to package, torquey, and fun to ride. Up to a certain size, where the weight of a single piston and connecting rod create unacceptable vibrations that irritate the…
The days might still be hot here on the East Coast, but they’re steadily getting shorter, and the evenings have the familiar cool snap. Summer is nigh over, but here at RSBFS we are just gearing up for one of the best seasons to get out on a sportbike and relish the crisp temperatures and…