Project Kawasaki H2C Part 1 Purple Pain!

Meet Purple Pain (apologies to Prince). She is Ralph’s widow maker and she is not quite right, as you will find out.

- Ralph Ferrand

As anyone who reads my dubious outpourings in this most august of organs on a regular basis will know, I am a great devotee of much of the output from the Akashi Works of Kawasaki Heavy Industries from the 70s and 80s.

I have always had big four-strokes, mostly based on the king of 70s superbikes – the magnificent game-changing Z1. I’ve always had misgivings about strokers; proponents have always tried to convince me that they are so much simpler with fewer moving parts, but my experience of stink wheels has been that whilst they have fewer parts, keeping those parts turning requires in-depth intimacy of the dark arts and black magic. A very good friend of mine, John Hopkins, sadly no longer with us, had a lifelong love of two-strokes and finally got his hands on an H1E in a hideous brown color, which he assured me was the canine genitalia. I had a test ride on it and nearly wrote it and myself off when a woman changed lanes in front of me unexpectedly, and I quickly realized why the marque was colloquially rebranded as the widow maker back in the day. The lack of braking efficacy was beyond anything I had ridden since my NSU Quickly. I really wasn’t impressed with the retardation or the acceleration, and given he claimed the best economy he ever got from it was 26mpg, it really didn’t light my candle.