In 1977 I knew when it was last call
in the bars two miles away, for I could
hear that musical three-cylinder sound
of Kawasaki H1s and H2s upshift-
ing away into the night. Today, four
decades later, the sound has defaulted
to Harley-Davidson Sportsters. At the
end of the 1960s if we were working
late in our Boston-area shop, custom-
ers would come in to describe with
excited hand gestures their evenings
of hunting down and smoking off
Sportsters and Triumph Bonnevilles.
Waiting for them, outside the local
bar, The Ebb Tide. The old kings were
fragile, and easily felled. Kawis ruled!
Our East Coast Kawasaki service
manager, Eddie Moran, showed us
how: Stand over the running bike;
bring up the revs; drop the clutch; and
with back tire spinning, sit down and
leave it all behind.
Kawasaki’s so-called N100
plan—to take over the U.S.
high-performance motorcycle
scene—was hatched in 1966–67.
It began with an estimate of the/ ORIGINS /
ARROW OF
CHANGE
The 1969 Kawasaki H1 Triple
By KEVIN CAMERON/ Photos from the CYCLE WORLD ARCHIVE and KAWASAKIARCHIVE
I
OPPOSITE: This factory-fresh example of an
H1 was photographed by Kawasaki a few
years ago and described as “perfect.”28 / CYCLE WORLD