STYLING AND DESIGN

You can’t deny that the Kawasaki has had some serious love in this department. Regardless of whether you like the look or not, you can tell that the Zed has been sketched, CAD-ed and clay modelled to death. The result? It looks like something that Judge Dredd would ride on his day off, such is the menace it possesses. That low snout raises a few eyebrows, although it seems weirder than it actually is from the pilot’s perspective. But as a whole, it works. Delve deeper and you are rewarded by a feast of neat touches, like the sculpted die-cast mirrors, crafted exhausts, eccentric rear wheel adjuster and colour coded cowl-less rear seat. Kawasaki crap on about ‘Sugomi design’, the Japanese word describing energy and aura, but as much as we dislike this marketing guff, the Zed is certainly in possession of something special that would make us go out an polish it, even if it didn’t need it. The BMW, on the other hand, is laughingly similar to its sportsbike brother. Yes, we know that there have been all sorts of changes made to turn the R into something very different than the RR, but to the untrained eye the German designers have failed in this task. It’s akin to a spy putting on a fake moustache and hoping that he’d go unrecognised… Is this a bad thing, though? No, is the short answer. The BMW has the air of a reader special about it. There’s a glint in its eye and the pointy front and even pointier rear house between them a bike that looks toned, honed and ready for action. It may not look pretty (the collector box being a particular eyesore) or be endowed with a designer’s clever styling cues threaded throughout, but it has presence…