But he was a submariner and already well down the road to total lunacy. The factory had kind of lost its way, and its Germans, and no-one seemed to be interested in Katanas with pop-up headlights, or a smaller 650 engine – except this one bloke I knew who loved his. Suzuki stopped making the Katana in 2000. Did that stop us telling lies about our Katana being a special Seth Efriken one? Not at all. Sure, we got Katanas with spoked wheels, but they were not E27SZXs. So there were only ever 45 super-hot Katanas created and none of them ever made it Downunder directly via the factory. Somehow, South Africa got 25, but no-one is even sure if that was meant to happen.
Pops Yoshimura allegedly made the cams, the brake-lines were braided, Mikuni smoothbores were installed along with bigger-diameter mufflers, and some lightweight spoke rims topped off the new package.Īs it turned out, only 20 E27SZXs ever made it into New Zealand. Hysterical Kiwis made unseemly demands, and Suzuki listened. But the brilliant Honda CB1100R was coming, and it was coming for the head of Suzuki with a big, sharp, Japanese axe. Graham Crosby’s success on the racetracks had ensured Suzuki had 42 per cent of the New Zealand market. Then for reasons to do with racing and Honda, the Kiwis got involved and the mythical Southern Hemisphere Wire-Wheeled Katana was born – the E27SZX. The Katana lived and went on to become the stuff of legend when it finally died.Ī part of this legend was built in 1982, when the factory produced a version called the SZ, which was eligible for racing under the international superbike rules. Well, the media was wrong, and Hunter was half-right. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. I’m almost convinced that Hunter S Thompson was looking at the same poster I was when he wrote: “One of God’s own prototypes. But no-one knew any better back then.Īlmost immediately, the world’s motorcycle media hated it. And by today’s standards they didn’t handle at all. The beast actually topped out at about 218.ĭid it handle? Sure, by 80s standards all sorts of things ‘handled’. It tipped the scales at 232 Kgs dry, howled down the quarter mile in 11.5 seconds and, as I discovered after drinking six beers and taking the keys from my mate, Frank, had an indicated top speed of 240km/h – which was a fully fledged lie. It grunted out 97Nm of torque and spewed forth 111 brake horsepower. Did this thing even exist and did it work? How could anything that looked like this possibly be serious? “What fresh and fabulous Hell is this?” I said to myself as I sticky-taped the image above my bed. The Katana debuted at the Intermot show at the end of 1980, and the first models were hitting showrooms in 1981, which is when that poster went up on my wall as my pants went into the laundry basket. They put what they’d developed inside a wind tunnel and at the end of the day, created the fastest and wildest-looking bike the world had yet seen. Still, when he got together with Jans Fellstrom and Hans-Georg Kasten, smashed a few beers and broke out the crayons, motorcycle design was never the same again. At first glance, Hans hardly possessed the kind of background that spoke of cutting-edge design. Hans Muth was the former chief-of-styling for BMW.
I just bought a GSX1100EX instead, and regretted it ever since. I was not a patient man then, and I am not one now. But the sales-animal told me I would have to wait a few months. It was iconic, ground-breaking and I came very close to buying one.
She was on a Suzuki GSX1000S Katana – a bike which sat the motorcycle universe on its prissy white arse after punching it the face a few times.ĭesigned by steel-eyed Germans still coming to terms with placing a distant second in WW2, it was styled like nothing before it, and lots of stuff after it.
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