Greatest Bikes
Kawasaki Mach III H2 with Boris Mihailovic
NB: Images featured here are the later generation 750cc machine
Two years after everyone had sex with everyone else during the Summer of Love in 1967, Kawasaki started making widows. 1969 was the year Kawasaki’s glorious wedge of two-stroke hatred, the Mach III H2 came into the world – and sent so many riders out of it.
Built for a performance-crazed US market, the 500cc Mach III redefined acceleration and filled hospital beds with unmatched enthusiasm. It would do the quarter mile in under 13 seconds.
If you were on drugs, you could get it up to 180km/h. Or even a bit more if the drugs were really good and the road was really straight and long and angled downhill a bit.
In the end, no-one was really sure how fast it went in a straight line. Those who tried to find out usually died. But what everyone did know was it would not go around a corner. People who tried that usually died too.
It had no mercy. But it had a capacitor and a thyristor that produced 30,000 volts to blow up the petrol. The exploding two-stroke fuel acted like a missile thruster system. And just like a missile, it would not go around corners.
It weighed 175kg and had the best power-to-weight ratio of any bike ever produced in 1969. It made 55 Nm of torque and 60 horsepower. But it would not go around corners and it wouldn’t stop, either. Its brakes were diabolical.
So it was the greatest of things. A bike that went like stink but only in a straight line, with shit brakes and crap suspension. There was clearly a price to be paid for all that free 1960s love. The motorcycle media was appalled.
‘Motorcyclist Magazine’ said,
“Viewed logically, the Kawasaki H1 had many flaws. The gearbox was odd, with neutral below first, the brakes very questionable and the handling was decidedly marginal in every situation – except when the bike was stopped with the engine switched off.”
No-one cared. Crazed teenagers bought them and raced them and laughed like apes, and died like dogs. It scared the shit out of riders, and they loved it.
It’s the reason America invaded Vietnam. It’s the reason titanium started to be used in surgical theatres.
It’s the reason older riders still smile and cry when they hear a two-stroke. And it’s the ideal LAMS bike for today’s bold and daring teenager.
Find one. Ride one. I dare you.
