KAZUHISA TAKANO: THE MAN BEHIND THE TRICITY

Kazuhisa Takano spent the early part of his career developing race bikes, including Rossi’s M1 and Wayne Rainey’s YZR500. And this helped him develop the Tricity: ‘The thing we place most importance on with a race machine is making it easy to ride. You might think the main focus would be to make it fast, but the important thing is fine-tuning the machine to move as the rider feels it should. We apply this philosophy to all our production models, especially the Tricity. ‘I have an obsession with linked mechanisms and suspension structures, and did a lot of research in this. Not only by computer simulation, but also by making mock-ups. In the end we found a variation that moved and functioned very well. This was a parallelogram link mechanism, combined with telescopic suspension. A telescopic suspension gives a very natural feeling to the ride and is an extremely refined piece of technology in the field of motorcycles.’