The Concorde, at the time, represented the pinnacle of sophistication and technology, not to mention aerodynamics. Muth gave us the original Katana, with its square headlight and long, downward-poking nose that the then-Suzuki president said reminded him of the Concorde supersonic jet. You could argue that the Katana started the whole design scene now celebrated in the Radwood culture and its worship of the 1980s.
#KATANA MOTORCYCLE FREE#
So to break free of that design tyranny, Suzuki went rogue and hired a German, Hans Muth of Target Design Studio in Germany, to come up with a new look. But what clothes! Up till the 1982 Katana came out, all bikes from Japan looked pretty much the same, right down to the de rigueur round headlight in front.
#KATANA MOTORCYCLE LICENSE#
But is it just a GSX-S1000F in new clothes, with a new snout, new rear license plate holder and new, retro look? Well, the original 1982 Katana in its day was just a GS1100E in new clothes, remember. The new Katana shares a lot of parts with the current GSX-S1000F and GSX-R sportbikes, including the engine and twin-spar aluminum frame. For the most part, it was fine, since for the most part the weather and the roads were dry and the Katana performed like the upright retro sportbike hero it is. It just so happened that Suzuki offered its new Katana to me in the middle of winter. And if you wait a couple days after the storms, most of it’s gone and the roads are clear and the pavement’s dry. Even in the mountains down here, there isn’t that much snow. Like I say, winter ain’t as tough for us as it is for you.
What did I ride on a day like this in conditions like these? An adventure bike? A snow-tire-shod dirt bike? A snowmobile? No. And sometimes little rivers of mud flow across the roads. Everything’s relative.īut we do have mountains and they get snow and ice, really. No, I live in California, Southern California, and when we say cold, we don’t really mean it in the same way you say cold. No, it wasn’t cold like in Minnesota where the guys who make Aerostich riding gear spent one winter trading off riding a Zero electric motorcycle to work just to see what it was like (answer: It was cold!).
At least not like your kind of cold, where winter crawls down from the North Pole and blows icy-frigid blasts of howlin’ snow and forces everybody inside where they crank the heater and just sit there waiting for spring.
That, and the fact that it maybe wasn’t all that cold. In the end, it was the triple-layer Dainese airbag-equipped matching riding gear with extra insulating layers that kept me from going full-hypothermic.