Boiling hot!

Within Kettle Club circles, Phil Baldwin’s 1000cc four-cylinder version of Suzuki’s GT750 has become legendary. John Nutting takes ‘The Beast’ for a ride and comes back surprised

- JOHN NUTTING

Some reckon that when Suzuki’s engineers were developing their first proper superbike back in the late 1960s, they built a four-cylinder two-stroke liquid-cooled version of the 500cc Cobra twin, which was then the Hamamatsu factory’s biggest bike.

The story goes that they bottled out of offering a 1000cc four, chopped off one of the pots and ended up with a 750cc machine which would have been on the superbike trend at the time, and the GT750 emerged. Nothing much wrong with that, because the Kettle, as it became affectionately called, is a fine touring machine. But the theory that the bigger bike existed lingers, and certainly does in the mind of Kettle Club stalwart Phil Baldwin, who turned it into reality by building what he thinks it might have been like. So here I am threading my way through the twisty lanes of north Kent on that very machine trying to keep up with Phil on one of his GT750 triples, a minter he’s owned for many years.