Cycle News

Cycle News 2020 Issue 33 August 18

Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles

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VOLUME 57 ISSUE 33 AUGUST 18, 2020 P121 the Kawasaki Z1, code-named the "New York Steak" within Ka- wasaki, was originally supposed to be a 750cc motorcycle, until Honda came out first with the four-cylinder SOHC CB750, after which Kawasaki redesigned it to be a DOHC 900cc model, thus raising the bar to be the biggest and best. He details development of the variable-rate Uni-Trak rear suspension on the tandem-twin KR250, and modestly recounts how a frame he designed himself in his spare time successfully combated the wayward handling of the original H2-R, which produced too much power for its Japanese-made chassis to handle. He also tells the story of the famed Kawasaki refrigerator, an iconic soft drinks cabinet that became part of So- Cal racing legend. Wait till you see the photo of it to understand why! He details many rider idio- syncrasies, like Yvon Duhamel always insisting that white workshop rags be wrapped round his footrests, shifter and rear brake pedal, so that if oil got on them it'd stop his feet from slipping. And just like Agostini on his MVs, Yvon wanted colored friction tape wrapped around his brake and clutch levers for better grip. Dave Aldana gets a five-star rating as a backup rider to Eddie Lawson, and Randy reveals Dave's passion for breeding and racing pigeons as a get-away-from-it-all hobby. Lawson comes over as the rider he most enjoyed working with, a consummate pro who just loved racing motorcycles, and pushed hard for his friend Wayne Rainey to be selected to replace him when he moved on to 500 GP racing with Yamaha, with positive results. There are heaps of great Duhamel stories, another rider Hall evidently relished working with, but Mike Baldwin appears as a source of frustration, as a "very driven rider who thought going at 110% all the time was the only way to race, and had trouble accepting that to win the championship you didn't need to win all the races." Hall is also the man who gave Freddie Spen- cer his first rides on a factory Japanese motorcycle, when he hired him to race the KZ1000 Superbike in 1979 after Baldwin was badly injured at Loudon. Fast Freddie won both his races on a Kawasaki, the first time he'd raced a four-cylinder Superbike— only for management changes at KMC to allow him to slip through their hands, after Honda reacted faster and signed him up for the long-term. 1980s road racing history would have been very different if Kawasaki had been quicker on the draw! Hall's inside story of Kawa- saki's rider relations is matched by his in-depth development story of the superbikes that won the AMA title in 1981/'82 with Lawson and 1983 with Rainey. The detailed numbers are all there, too, you don't have to be a flow engineer to appreci- ate the stories Hall recounts of how Jerry Branch transformed the KZ1000 cylinder head, or how the array of exhaust pipes from Yoshimura, Kerker, Bas- sani and Formula 1 car racer Dan Gurney through painstaking testing produced the effective Kerker design they ended up using. These books are packed with fascinating facts and insider detail in a way that has never yet been available for any Japanese manufacturer's race team, and we can only hope that one day someone else does the same for the other three J-majors, or indeed, Ducati. Anyone remotely interested in road racing during this era, American or otherwise, Kawasaki fan or not, will relish reading both these books for the fascinating behind-the-scenes insight they impart on how to go racing successfully—with fo- cused passion. The whole story of Kawasaki's earliest racing years is here, written by the man who was always at the heart of the action, whether on the race- track or behind the scenes. CN Lean, Mean and Lime Green Volumes 1 (The Two-Stroke Years) & 2 (The U.S. Superbike Years) By Randy Hall Published by BRG Multimedia Ltd. www.leanmeanlimegreen.com

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