VOL. 54 ISSUE 10 MARCH 14, 2017 P101
green hills of Central California
after a serious rain season, I do
believe I may have just found the
most enjoyable all-around sport-
bike I've ever ridden.
I can't lie, 650cc parallel-twins
have, for the most part, avoided
my radar completely until about
two years ago when I raced one
and finished in eighth place on
a Kawasaki 650 during an Isle
of Man Lightweight TT. Flog-
ging that little bike around the
Mountain Course was so damn
fun, I can still remember grin-
ning inside of my helmet for the
entire race.
There's something very
special about how the midrange
of this particular configuration
of motor—a parallel-twin—gets
delivered. They don't rev to the
moon, they don't accelerate in
stupid powerful ways, they just
kind of plod along with a cer-
tain driven content. Our team's
Kawasaki 650 race engines
were prepared by Carl Fogarty's
long-time mechanic Slick Bass,
who lives and works on the Isle
of Man, and boy did they croon.
Still, on the whole, Kawasaki's
new 2017 model we just tested
on the street is light years ahead
of even our best 650cc race
bike to date.
For starters, the new machine
in street trim has lost some 42
pounds over just last year's mod-
el. The weight removed for 2017
is about the equivalent of one
of the heavy-as-f**k five gallon
Sparkletts water bottles many of
us have to carry upstairs from
the garage to the kitchen. It's a
serious and tangible amount of
weight.
The chassis alone—rede-
signed by Kawasaki's in-house
analysis techniques to deter-
mine pipe diameters, lengths,
Kawasaki sells a
ton of these things
so getting the new
model right was
imperative.
Single seat cowl makes for a
pretty tough looking rear.
