Given the title, I’m sure you’re looking for some “I pity the fool…” type of comments here, but you will get none from me. Although looking back some 34 years from the future – in a world where nearly every car (from econo box to sports car) is either turbocharged, supercharged or both – it…
Honda is well known as an engineering company. It’s where engineers thrive on unique challenges, novel solutions, and experimentation. It is what brought us such varied hardware as single cylinder 2-strokes and 4-strokes, twins in every conceivable combination and vee angle, V-3 2-strokes, V-4s, inline fours, horizontally opposed fours, and of course a wonderful mix…
Imagine the scene in Honda dealerships back in 1982: Buck Rogers – your bike is ready. One can only imagine what the buying public thought of a futuristic, turbocharged rocket ship that offered liter-bike power in a 500cc format. Unfortunately, the reaction from the general public was not to immediately rip open their wallets and…
Time to jump into the Wayback Machine and make the trek back to the 1980s. Legwarmers are optional equipment here. What you are looking at is perhaps the most polished and complete of the factory Turbo bikes of the era. A technological tour de force of the time – along the lines of 2001: A…
The Eighties were a wild time in terms of motorcycle development. Manufacturers experimented with all types of engines, suspensions, chassis, materials and design. Like Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, those bikes best suited to their environment survived; other, less fortunate machines fell to the onslaught of progress. This 1983 Suzuki XN85 Turbo is one such…
With the other manufacturers building their exotic turbocharged 80s confections around more sophisticated four-cylinder designs, why did Honda base their CX650 Turbo on a bike that was so ugly, the British press dubbed it the “plastic maggot”? Well even though a simple, pushrod v-twin seems to go against the high-tech theme these motorcycles embodied, the…
While at first glance this appears to be a customization run amock, it is actually something a bit more than that, a 1980 Mystery Ship. The Mystery Ship was the brainstorm of Craig Vetter, founder of the aftermarket Windjammer motorcycle fairing company. After Vetter sold Windjammer in 1978, he embarked on a new effort..a “streetable road racer,…
Update 5.13.2015: First listing was a no sale at $20,800 reserve not met. Relisted now with a buy-it-now of $21,500. Good luck to buyers and seller! -dc Kawasaki’s Z1R-TC is the kind of bike they just don’t make anymore, mainly because repeat customers are so important and dead customers generally can’t buy anything. It was…