My ZX-9R C-2 Ninja

Ah… S528 JJH, my blue ZX-9R Ninja C-2 – we did so much together. For us bigger lads it was a lot more comfy than an R1 even if it didn’t offer the same cool looks and kick-in-the-pants performance. That said, it wasn’t far off and was plenty fast enough for anyone without a death wish or an urge to go to prison for speeding.

Long-term bikes are given to a lucky few and I speak from experience that many journalists think they are a God-given right, I never did and always tried to gel with any bike I was lucky enough to be handed.

I would do my 60-mile daily commute on her; I would do various UK and European tours; take in a couple of track-days; and a colleague even took her to Morocco for a jaunt.

Back then we all had a hankering for making bikes ‘unique to us’ and so it proved with me. I got a ‘just about colour-matched’ pillion cowling, an NWS carbon-fibre rear hugger, an MPS double-bubble smoked screen, and even had the bike stage-one tuned by PDQ to try and claw back the deficit on a standard R1. On went a lightweight Hindle pipe, in went a Dynojet kit and K&N air-filter. After a few dyno runs we’d gone from 129.6bhp up to 138.7bhp. Not sure if that was at the crank or the rear tyre… it was more than 20 years back and my memory is shot…

I kept it clean and tidy, so the paint never fell off the wheels as it could and the Tokico six-pots worked well and benefitted from

EBC ddouble-blh padsd and d Goodridge hoses. Carb icing did occur (it felt like you were running out of fuel) but cleaning the coolant filter did help.

By the time I left the magazine my beloved 9R stayed with them and it did suffer a little, thanks in part to a batch of iffy Dynojet kits; power became way too peaky over time, but PDQ sorted this out.

During my year with it, the bike did 25,000 miles and was stripped down at the end of it. All that was found was a badly seated main bearing, which probably occurred at the factory. Expert analysis said this wouldn’t have caused a premature failure of any kind anyway. Apart from worn consumables (brake discs were on the limit, the forks had sludged up and the rear shock had lost gas in the remote reservoir) it was as robust as the day it left the factory.

What happened to S528 JJH afterwards is lost in the mists of time... one errant, experienced journalist did dump it in 2000 and then it stayed in the care of BSD tuners/bike experts for a while where I tracked it down in 2001 and tried to buy it to become a track-day tool for myself. Sadly Kawasaki wanted it back.

Records now show that S528 JJH is SORN and last had an MOT which expired in July 2021. I’d love to be reunited with her once again!