It's
1973 and I'm riding my 60s Bonneville home from work. The engine's
faltering and I feel a weekend in the garage coming on, a common
occurrence but I can't afford anything better. A mate's got HP on a
new Trident but he doesn't put up with it for long. Soon he's on a
Z900, a true superbike, the like of which we've never seen despite
being gob-smacked a few years back by Honda's revolutionary CB750 .
Then I'm riding a Yamaha and then it's 1979 and I'm on a Z1000ST with
a bullet proof engine (and believe me, at 23 I know how to fire
bullets at an engine). The bike does every journey faultlessly, all
year round. It carries me to work each day, blasts the weekends and
come summer, travels with me on holiday.
Roll
on nearly 40 years and I'm looking at my new Bonneville nestling in
the garage next to my other bikes, the one I use for touring and the
winter hack. The Triumph's a wonderful bike and a truly authentic
retro – a combination of classic looks and modern performance
(which I now sadly think of in terms of ease of use). I read MSL
and see a Kawasaki Z900RS for the first time, a fantastic looking
machine that like the Triumph has been cleverly targetted. The
Kawasaki is not an attempt at faithful visual reproduction, unlike the
Triumph, but in their own words, a homage to the old Z. A tribute,
maybe, to the spirit that created it. And, to me, that's what makes
the RS special - it's a very capable, contemporary machine that
dares to be a bit different, very much like the Z1 all those years
ago.
The
irony is that if the RS is to be viewed as a retro classic, then it's
been out retro'd by the very machines the original kicked into touch,
as the new T120 Bonneville is surely the best on the market. But I
hope the Z1's innovative spirit lives on and that if I could roll on
another 40 years, I'd see the same ethos creating wonderful electric
bikes that do everything we want of them: carry us to work, blast the
weekends and once a year, travel with us on holiday. Maybe there'll
be a lithium homage to the Electraglide.
