Paul Malin’s 1991 Kawasaki KX500SR
April 04, 2007
The Kawasaki factory teams have always had some of the trickest bikes available and with the European team being run from the Kawasaki UK headquarters in Bourne End for a decade, there was a high factory presence in the British scene from the early eighties through to the early nineties when the godfather of the Kawasaki racing effort Alec Wright retired and handed the gauntlet over to the European-based Jan de Groot.
When Kawasaki hired the king Dave Thorpe away from the mighty HRC squad in 1990, they armed him with the all new perimeter-framed bike and gave his young team-mate Paul Malin the older steel framed model to use – though to be brutally honest the performances from the multi World Champ didn’t do the new bike justice, and though they were testing, desperately trying to get the bike to perform to the standards he had grown to expect from Honda, they were actually getting further and further away from where they needed to be. DT threw in the towel at the end of 1990 and opted to use the steel-framed dinosaur and his results were coming back slowly.
The bike was handed to youngster Paul Malin to try; Paul and his mechanic Kevin Morris (who now works for rally team Pro-Drive) tested for three days straight and actually got the bike to work fairly well for the Derbyshire youngster, as his riding style actually suited his style better than DT who was revving the bike harder.
When the 1992 season rolled around the boss kept things as they were and Malin got to use the MK2 model of the perimeter-framed bike, which was head and shoulders above the bike from the former year. However, although DT was still pencilled in to ride the bike, he still opted to use the older frame.
The ‘91 model looked very similar to its predecessor, but in fact the Japanese engineers had put in their homework and had made the bike very good. Malin started off the year well, though while leading the opener in Payerne by a good margin the shock seal blew. His fortune bettered with the French round where he won every qualifier and both races. Though his team mate Thorpe was having problems with the con-rod breaking, the team were trying different cylinders and cranks to prevent this, it also took the edge off the power plant and even though Pup wasn’t having any issues with breakdowns he wasn’t allowed to use the stuff he was having success with earlier in the year. This changed in the summer and though the World Championship had been lost he got back from 11th to 4th in the final standings.
The actual bike is a proper factory effort as the perimeter frame was never seen on a production KX500; though a few individuals (myself included) took the 250 chassis and squeezed a 500 motor into them for the public who were desperate for the new look perimeter frame and plastics.
The motor was the tried and tested power-valve plant, which even in stock trim had more than enough power, and with the factory input it was an awesome power delivery. Adding to the trick factor was oh-so-cool magnesium two-piece clutch covers and plenty of unobtanium which made these bikes stand out from the crowd, as in this year the factory bikes from the other manufacturers seemed very tame by comparison – the factory input from Japan was toned down due to the AMA production rule in effect from the States, making the one-off works bikes even more expensive as they would only be legal in the GP paddock.
The bikes were put to rest at the end of the 1991 season, as the team went full time on 250 2-strokes in ‘92 thus bringing the curtain down on the factory Kawasaki 2-strokes forever. It was only fourteen years later when the green bikes would have a factory presence in the open class again.
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