Quick Ride
QUICK RIDE
SPECIALS Z1000 The time traveler
HERE S A TWO-WHEELED time warp, a bike so classically ’70s that you can almost feel the wind flapping at the legs of your bell-bottoms. Its instruments and the sweep of its tank are pure air-cooled Kawasaki, and the engine’s slight harshness hints that it’s a real, live Z-1. But this is 1993, and you’re riding a motorcycle that goes around comers like no standard Z-bike ever did.
This somewhere-betweenold-and-new sensation is inten-
tional, and is to be found aboard a machine built by a firm called Specials (Unit 2, 142 Strathcona Drive, Anniesland, Glasgow, Scotland, G13 1JQ; telephone Oil 44 41 954 4225) around an aluminum frame from Britain’s famed Spondon Engineering. It’s a brilliantly simple idea. Take an old air-cooled Kawasaki, one of the earlier Z-l or KZ1000 models with rounded styling. Unbolt its engine plus other parts such as tank, sidepanels, tailpiece and electrics. Then fix them all to the shiny new highperformance frame, complete with as many modern chassis parts as your budget allows.
The result follows the lines of the original machine, but instead of the original Z’s kickedout fork, this bike’s legsborrowed, like the wheels and brakes, from Kawasaki’s 1992 ZX-7-are inclined at a respectably steep angle.
Placing the engine six-tenths of an inch to the left of its normal centerline moves the chain over enough to allow fitment of a 170-section rear tire. Fourpiston Tokico calipers bite a pair of drilled front discs, while shocks are Öhlins units bolted to a box-section alloy swingarm.
The engine in this bike is from a 1977 KZ1000. Its internals are stock, but it wears a set of 38mm Mikunis from a GSX-R1100, with K&N filters and a Dynojet kit, plus a D&D 4-into-l exhaust. Hitting the starter button sets the bike warbling into life, and dumping the clutch brings about acceleration that is pleasantly brisk, thanks in part to the short gearing provided by 17-inch wheels and two extra teeth on the bike’s rear sprocket. In town and on tight roads, that was fine, combining with the Mikuni’s crisp response to give plenty of instant urge. But on the open road the relatively highrevving motor felt a bit buzzy, topping out at 110 miles per hour at 9000 rpm.
Unlike the original version, the Specials Z1000 felt as though it could have coped with far more speed, remaining rock solid in most conditions, with a combination of light steering and taut feel-thanks to its very stiff frame-reminiscent of a modern machine.
The Specials Z1000 is extremely nimble, reasonably quick and relatively inexpensiveat least by trick-frame standards. The basic kit, which consists of frame with footpegs, swingarm, Öhlins shocks and rear-wheel axle, costs about £2200, the equivalent of about $3400. Any way you look at it, its an entertaining way to give an old Kawasaki a new lease on life.
Roland Brown
