Larry Lawrence | June 28, 2017
Jim Knipp standing with his beautifully restored Kawasaki at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in June of 2017. (Photo by Larry Lawrence)
Jim Knipp and his Kawasaki KZ650 road racer were legendary in the Midwestern club-racing scene in the early 1980s. Indianapolis-based Knipp and his GP-looking KZ won dozens of WERA races and eventually the WERA C Superbike National Championship in 1981. Knipp was a rider on the rise and was looking to move up to the AMA Superbike ranks, so the Kawasaki was sold to make way for a Honda Superbike and eventually Knipp lost track of the machine.
Many years went by and the bike would have likely ended up in a scrap heap somewhere in Wisconsin, if not for road racer Gordon Lunde. Lunde was picking up a bike at a buddy’s garage, when out of the corner of his eye something caught his attention. It was a banged up old racing machine with a red frame. Being a longtime road racer Lunde was curious and stepped over piles of old parts to get a closer look. He couldn’t believe what he saw. Sitting there, presumably where old bikes go to die, was Knipp’s old racing KZ650.
Lunde knew of the racing heritage of the bike since he’d raced against Knipp and saw the bike win numerous races and actually bought the bike and raced himself for a time before selling it.
Turns out Knipp’s Kawasaki had gone through several hands before ending up in the dark corner of a garage. Lunde was probably one of the few people in the country who knew the significance of the bike. His plan was to eventually get around to restoring it.
Meanwhile Knipp went on to race AMA Superbike on a Honda and AMA Formula One with a Yamaha TZ500 before retiring from pro racing. Years later he and friend Brian Gaines were restoring a 1973 Kawasaki Z1 that was Gaines’ first race bike. They often talked about how cool it would be to find Knipp’s old Kawasaki and restore it. Gaines wanted to make it happen, but had no idea where the bike was or even if it still survived.
Gaines started putting out feelers to old WERA racers to see if anyone knew what became of the championship-winning KZ. Fortunately, Gaines made a connection and was put in touch with Lunde. Lunde, hearing that the bike would be heading back to Knipp, the rider who made the bike famous, decided to sell the bike to Gaines.
The great part of the story was that Gaines now had Knipp’s old racebike, but Knipp had no idea.
“I talked to him about the possibility of putting a fairing on my Z1,” Gaines said. “And one day we were working on my bike and I told Jim I’d found on old racing fairing that might work.”
So Gaines went out to his truck and got the nosecone of the fairing and brought back to Knipp.
“He got real quiet, looked at it for a second and said, ‘You know, this looks like the kind of fairing I used on my KZ650 back in the day.’”
“Oh really,” Gaines said. “Well let me get the sidepod. I put the sidepod up to the nosecone and Jimmy was looking at it real funny and said, ‘I think this is just like the one I used to have.’ And I said, “You think so? What are the chances of that happening?’
Then after showing him the seat section, Knipp said, “This is the seat from my old bike. Look here where I had two holes for the oil cooler!”
Eventually Gaines led Knipp out to his truck where he uncovered the rest of the bike, which was in crates, from the tarp. Knipp immediately recognized the frame and other pieces of his old racebike, which he’d last seen over 35 years earlier.
Jim Knipp racing his Kawasaki KZ650 Superbike in 1981.
Gaines said the reaction Knipp had wasn’t quite what he’d expected. “I thought he’d be jumping for joy, but he was pretty quiet. I asked him about it the next day and he said, ‘It’s bittersweet. It’s great to see the bike again, but to see it in this condition was tough. When I gave that bike up it was 100 percent and spotless and running great. It kind of hurts to see my baby like that.’ I said, ‘Jimmy, that is your baby and it’s not going to be like that for long. We’re going to do a ground up, just like we did with my Z1.”
That was a year ago and Knipp wanted it to be as original as possible, which meant trying to chase down parts that in many cases, hadn’t been available since the early 1980s. For instance: “We looked all over kingdom come for the original German-made Magura clip-ons but couldn’t find them,” Gaines said. “Then I found a guy out of Vermont who’d bought a warehouse out of old British bikes and he had a set of them in the original package. It seemed like everything went like that.”
As raced back in the early ‘80s, Knipp said the modifications weren’t as extensive as the competitors on 750 and 1000cc bikes he used to drive nuts figured.
“It was not anything really extravagant,” Knipp explained. “We took so much weight off it and ran total loss electrical. The 29mm smoothbores were pretty big for a 650. It always had stock pistons, but it had some fairly healthy cams, valves and springs. It had a hand-bent Yoshimura pipe and a Yoshimura ported head, so that’s where it got a lot of its power.”
Today the bike is much as it was when Knipp raced it to the ’81 WERA National title, with a few notable exceptions.
“The wheels are different from when I had it,” he said. “The rear shocks, obviously Avon Tires because nobody makes 18-inch slicks anymore and haven’t for 20 years. But other than that, a lot of it is basically the same.”
The results of a year of work can be seen in this photo from last weekend’s Brickyard Vintage Racing Invitational at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway where the restored bike made its debut. Greg Sickmeier, who was teammates with Knipp on the old Superbike Factory squad, rode the bike around the IMS road course.
Knipp admits the old KZ650 has a special place in his heart. After all, he’d spent his first three seasons of road racing on the bike.
“Not only for the race wins and the championship,” he said. “but I was able to do things on this bike that I couldn’t on others. I had so much seat time on the thing.”
Judging by the reaction photos of the bike got on social media, Knipp is not the only one thrilled to see the old Kawasaki back in racing shape.
