Review: Kawasaki KR 150 K
Little motorcycles are lovely. They offer performance way out of proportion to their displacement without getting daft about it, so you can ride them hard wherever you go without getting bored or placing your licence at risk, and they’re so light that they can be thrown around with abandon. I’ve been keen to ride one of the modern little two-stroke sports machines for a while now, so when Kawasaki offered me its KR 150 K for a few days I leaped at the chance.
At the heart of the little Kawasaki lies a water-cooled single-cylinder 148cc engine that spits out 30 horsepower (22kW) when you thrash it, and enough power to toddle about on in comfort when you don’t. The single front and rear disks scrub off speed with alacrity, and the 124kg machine handles like a dream thanks to its light mass.
Instrumentation is interesting. There’s a temperature gauge that doubles as a fuel gauge — a push on a button switches modes. The rev counter — well, it’s a rev counter, so it tells you how fast the engine’s spinning.
Then there’s the speedometer, which tells more lies than our good friend Krisjan Lemmer. With me up front and my son on the back the dial showed a hugely optimistic 190kph — I think about 155 or 160 would have been more honest.
Still, even without the bulldust the little bike’s a flier. The six-speed close-ratio gearbox is great fun to tickle, and the crisp-sounding expansion-box exhaust adds to the Grand Prix boy-racer experience.