for throughput of cooling air. It was,
in the words of Yvon Duhamel’s
roadrace tuner Steve Whitelock, “A
nice little engine. Really good.”
It worked, and despite being
more than 20 inches wide, the
triple easily hit the N100 numbers.
A chronic problem for dealers
would be the ambitious capaci-
tor-discharge ignition, firing special
surface-gap BUHX sparkplugs. Use
of a distributor brought the usual
problems of corona—an under-cap
“plasma glow” of electric energy
bleeding between cylinder wire
contacts that often bloomed into
actual arcing—and a blizzard
of warranty fixes. As delivered,
oil-injection metering pumps were
set to maximum, making big
smoke from the tailpipes. Much
less oil worked perfectly well once
break-in was completed.
Handling was widely criticized,
and I can offer two clues. One
was my visit to the H1 chassis line
in 1972, where I saw one side of
the steel frame completed, then
flipped it over and saw the other
side welded in place. Normally,
welds are made on alternating
sides, to zero out heat distortion.
Another was that when I disassem-
bled a rear damper, I found that its
top O-ring had, during assembly,
flipped to assume a D-shape. Thatdamper pumped out all its oil in
a few strokes. But in those days
suspension was as mysterious
as existence, so almost nobody
removed the springs to check for
equal damping.
The bikes were fast—a revolution.
The Kawasaki H1 put a stop to any
thought that pushrod four-strokes
could compete by being bored out
and revved-up even more. Forget it.
So in that sense, the H1—and the 50
percent bigger H2 of 1972—forced
four-stroke designers to build really
big engines, such as Kawasaki’s
903cc Z1 of 1973, with serious
DOHC cylinder heads. That, plus
the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency mandate for cleaner air, was
the only way to put the grinning
two-stroke genie back into its bottle.
Yet 110,000 H1s were built. QABOVE: Do I see a cautionary finger on
the clutch? This is the late Cli
Carr on my
1972 home-built Kawasaki 750 triple. Disc
brakes, C&J tank, 41mm fork tubes, Koni
shocks. I can almost hear it.
34 / CYCLE WORLD