CarBrandLogos archive · Kawasaki · 1965
A British twin, built in Japan, by a company that had been making aircraft.
Discover the storyPhoto: Chuck Schultz · CC BY-SA 2.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Kawasaki W1, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
Kawasaki's route into large motorcycles ran through Meguro, an old Tokyo firm it absorbed in the 1960s. Meguro's K-series was a close study of the BSA A7 — a 500cc vertical twin, faithfully copied down to the engine architecture — and Kawasaki enlarged it to 624cc to create the W1 in 1965.
1963 BSA A10 Super Rocket · Mfhutchins · CC BY-SA 3.0
02
At the time it was the largest-capacity motorcycle built in Japan, and the intention was explicit: sell it in the United States, where British twins dominated the big-bike market. That did not work. American riders who wanted a BSA bought a BSA, and the W1's four-speed gearbox, right-foot gearchange and vibration compared poorly with the machine it imitated. It sold respectably at home, where it found work as a police and highway bike, and stayed in production in various forms until 1974.
03
Its real significance is what it taught Kawasaki. Copying a British twin was a dead end; the company's answer was to build something no European firm could match, first with the H1 two-stroke triple and then with the Z1 four. The W name returned in 1999 on the W650, an air-cooled retro twin with a bevel-driven overhead camshaft — an affectionate reconstruction of the original rather than an imitation of anybody else — and has continued through the W800 to the present day.
At a glance
Produced
1965–1974Technical specification
Contemporaries from the 1960s
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