Judging by the A7, the 500cc rotary-valve twin could have been a world beater. (Ultimately, Kawasaki determined that the center cylinder never did present any sort of cooling issue.)Īnother problem, spark plug fouling, was solved by boosting the voltage of the Capacitor Discharge Ignition to zap the plugs with 25,000-30,000 volts. Instead of feeding behind the crank, its carburetors attached to the bottom of the cylinder. The A7 depended on a rotary disc, but the difficulty in feeding the center cylinder demanded that Kawasaki go with a standard piston-port, two-stroke design. Supposedly, the big problem with making a triple was dealing with middle-cylinder overheating. Using the very competitive 350cc A7 (above) as a starting point, Kawasaki began work on both a 500cc two-stroke twin and a three-cylinder design. Kawasaki had already started making a name for itself as a producer of small-capacity, two-stroke twins when they decided to up the ante by building a world-beater 500cc twin. Perhaps since it was a first effort, potential buyers simply decided to purchase the real thing (unlike today, there were quite a few new and competitive BSAs on the market).

It essentially was a 650 copy of the BSA-A10, and it didn’t sell well. While they didn’t cost significantly more to build than smaller models, they did carry a much larger price tag. Sometime during the 1960s, Kawasaki realized they could make more money with large-capacity motorcycles. They eventually produced a family of four, ranging from 250cc to 750cc.

Their constant goal was to build world’s fastest-accelerating production motorcycle when the competition started catching up, Kawasaki would then build a bigger one. Kawasaki did not come by its reputation by accident. The fact that they sounded like a herd of chainsaws while doing so did not diminish this well-deserved reputation–nor did it matter what you were riding or driving, since they came sized for any competition. ( first posted ) Around 1969, Kawasaki started developing a reputation for bikes that would pull up alongside you and then quickly leave you in a cloud of blue smoke.

Kawasaki leostar drag race