Bimotacrankout thekawasakis
Hot on the heels of the Tesi H2 comes the Kawasaki Z1000-powered, KB4. And there are more on the way…
W‘It is early days with the Kb4…but the prototype will be ready by spring’
hen Kawasaki applied their inancial de ibrillator to the Bimota corpse back in October 2019, they surely did not expect life to return quite this fast. After the internet-breaking Tesi H2 comes the KB4, a Z1000-powered retro sportsbike.
Bimota’s new marketing manager Gianluca Gallasso told Bike: ‘It is early days with the KB4 – we are still designing it and don’t have a prototype yet, but that will be ready by spring.’ And if that timeline seems ambitious, don’t forget that the Tesi H2 went from sketch to working prototype in three months.
This speed is down to one factor: Kawasaki have already done all the homologation, so Bimota can just get on with design. ‘Having homologated parts from Kawasaki is very important to us,’ says Gianluca, ‘because it means we can go to market immediately. For example the Tesi H2 could have sold on 1 January because we already have the homologation [it’s actually going on sale around April]. We also get all
Kawasaki’s electronic systems which take millions to produce. It was impossible for a small company like Bimota to do that.’ Kawasaki are also providing funds to get the old gang back together. Bimota’s new CEO is Dr Pierluigi Marconi, the engineer who created the original Tesi. ‘Kawasaki told him that they want to have the Bimota of the past, when the people were very important and kept the style of Bimota alive,’ says Gianluca, who won the Italian Superbike championship on a Bimota in the 1980s and was a development rider for the company from 1988 to 1998. Five of the other new recruits are also ex-staffers.
‘We need people urgently because we now have a lot of work. We have a list of model ideas and once the Tesi H2 and KB4 are in production, we will move on to the next projects.’