Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/531222
CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE W atching Jeremy Toye rip around Barber Motors- ports Park on the supercharged Kawasaki's H2R was quite an experience (can you imagine how Toye felt?). Jeremy would get the H2R through turn five, quite rapidly I might add, and then twist the throttle. Whoa! The Kawi literally looked like it was shot out of a rocket. I would have loved to see a factory Superbike out there running side by side with the H2R. While I'm certain the Superbike would make turn five at a faster rate, I'm guessing Toye and the H2R would give the Superbike everything it could handle once pointed down a straightaway. While I sat thoroughly enjoying watching Toye toy around on the H2R, the question came to mind: "Whatever happened to turbocharged mo- torcycles?" There was a period in the early 1980s that turbocharged sport bikes were all the rage. The Big Four all produced sporty turbos during that period. The promise was to take a smaller displacement and theoretically lighter motorcycle, bolt on a turbo and voilà: a sportbike with the power of a 1000cc machine and the handling of a 600. That was the idea anyway. Unfortunately in the real world it didn't quite work out that way. The bike that launched the turbo age was the iconic Kawasaki Z1-R TC (TC for Turbo-Charged in case you hadn't guessed). Middleweight bike with liter bike power be damned. This was a full-on 1000cc street burner to begin with in the KZ1000 and then they boosted the power with a turbo. Talk about your shenanigan bike! The Z1-R TC could get into the 10-second bracket in the quarter-mile, which was pretty amazing in 1978. The TC version sold for two years (1978-79) and you could buy them in Kawasaki dealerships. The only caveat was they didn't come with a warranty – you run too much boost and blow it, you pay for it. Of course not many of them blew, since the KZ1000 power- plant was legendary for its reliability. I was a new street rider at the time, tooling around the streets of Indianapolis on my brand spanking new Suzuki GS750 ($1995 out the showroom door in May of 1978) and trust me, when a Z1-R TC pulled alongside you at a stoplight you simply gave the rider a polite nod and went about your business. So by the time the early 1980s turbo bikes be- gan showing up we all had high hopes, knowing how wickedly fast the Z1-R TC had been. Forced induction was the wave of the future, or so we thought. These were exciting times. The first of the turbos was Honda's CX500 released in 1982. The original CX500 featured a THE TURBO AGE P118