Kawasaki ZN 1300 Voyager

Good old Blake was a fine one to talk. His friend Coleridge was the guy who went to extremes, dabbling with opium and dreaming of Xanadu. Nevertheless, Blake is right. How much is enough? Or (as the thought pertains to our discussion), how big can a touring bike be before its size intrudes unforgivingly on performance? Motorcycle designers, like racers, can't know for sure till they cross the border, hanging it out to discover how Newton's laws apply to the business at hand.

Kawasaki's new touring bike is right on the line. Nine-hundred-fifteen pounds (that's right, nine hundred) of luxury motorcycle. Anywhere except on the straightest open road the Kawasaki's size does indeed intrude, at times unforgivingly, on performance. But wait! This is a TOURING bike—designed exclusively for setting your sights on the next state, or even the next country, and making the big break.

Okay, we'll bite. We'll play angel's advocate. On a highway across rolling farmland the Voyager cradles you in comfort and provides you with every diversion and entertainment known to the modern nomad. It's powerful, smooth, comfortable, and equipped with high-quality luggage and wind protection. One-dimensionally, the Voyager is first-rate.

Touring comfort encompasses seating accommodations, suspension compliance and engine smoothness. The Voyager's seating position is excellent. Its handlebars adjust up and down and back and forth, and the angle of the pullback alters. Although the seat and pegs are non-adjustable, their positioning fits five-eight to six-foot riders well. They sit comfortably, their bodies in a classic touring posture torso dead vertical, thighs horizontal, lower legs vertical. The passenger too has some freedom of adjustability: the flick of a latch lets the tail trunk slide back and forth about two inches. With the trunk forward the passenger sits in the classic posture; with the trunk back she leans back slightly. The passenger's feet rest on floorboards rather than pegs—a nice touch. Both the rider and passenger find their seats firm but comfortable. Our riders would have uniformly preferred a softer foam composition, but throughout a full day's ride the quality remains 100 percent consistent.

With its range of adjustability (air front and rear, compression damping at the rear), the suspension provides settings for vastly different loads and road conditions. Fully loaded solo or two-up, the Kawasaki needs about 15 pounds of air in the front and 40 at the rear, with a number three or four damping adjustment to complement the stiff springing. Set up thusly, the wonderfully compliant suspension reacts quickly to small bumps or highway expansion joints, with enough travel to soak up the potholes.

With six cylinders stroking beneath you there's no mistaking the mechanical activity going on, but the high-frequency vibration is perceived generally rather than through any one point. At most rpm levels you sense an electric-like hum through the seat and bar; it's an almost pleasant sensation enhanced by the level rise in power delivery. Overall, we must rank the Voyager nearly as smooth as the Gold Wing or Venture but distinctive, like a BMW, with its own brand of smoothness.

That's open-road performance, but every road eventually turns. So, to give the whole picture, it's time to play devil's advocate. When you abandon the runway-straight interstate for the more curvy state highways, you feel every one of the Voyager's 915 pounds. That weight affects both handling (around town, on semi-tight roads and in special conditions on the open road), and performance (acceleration and fuel economy).

There may be a guy around big enough to jump on the Voyager and muscle it out of the parking lot, but none of our staffers fits the bill. We had to develop a little technique to maneuver the bike at low speeds without wobbling like a novice. The Voyager is so heavy, and the weight located so high, that simply getting under way can be exciting, turning tight in a parking lot is always an accomplishment, and tricky maneuvers—like backing downhill diagonally to the curb—require real concentration. The best way to keep the bike steady is to power it. Forget about putting a foot down to catch your balance; this requires throttle. But the 1300 is remarkably quick revving, so throttle alone results in jerkiness, which the moderate shaft reaction exacerbates. That means a combination of throttle and clutch is best. The clutch engagement is a touch sudden and the lever's engagement point is far from the bar, so a little practice is in order. We occasionally dialed in a little rear brake action at the same time. No matter how smooth you get, the abundant fork flex will always amaze you and sometimes make your low-speed wobbling downright comical.

On suburban streets, country roads or through the mountains, the 1300 demands respect. It steers well, and not just for a bike of its size. Response is quick, and requires minimal input. Handling, though, involves more than steering alone. Pick your line, steer into it and inertia overcomes your plans unless your speed is well within bounds. The Voyager, if you're riding briskly, may not follow the line you're used to. It drifts—wide. And if you try to roll it in tighter via countersteering, or reduce speed by braking, you may lose ground clearance. Most likely, you'll accept it and go wide, or drag something if necessary, then tone down the speed for the next turn. And the next one after that. On the positive side, for a bike its size, the ZN has pretty good ground clearance. The pegs touch down if you have too little air in the suspension or if you're moving along smartly, but that's truly an excellent warning system. And the tires stick well.

Side winds affect the Voyager unusually on the open road, another consequence of its mass. On one particular test ride, a 20-25 mph side wind made the Voyager's wheels feel as if they were rolling out from under the bike sideways. The result was sudden leaning of up to 10 or 15 degrees off vertical, and wandering in the lane, quite literally from white line to white line. Two other bikes during the same test, the Harley-Davidson FXRT and the Yamaha Venture, cut through the wind much better.

With any vehicle, sheer horsepower is only half the story. A locomotive may have some pretty impressive numbers, but its acceleration from 50 to 80 is wanting. The power-to-weight ratio more directly affects the motorcyclist. It's not a surprise that the ZN's roll-on acceleration is standard. From 2000 to 4000 rpm in the lower gears (first to third) the Voyager gives a good strong surge of acceleration. It quickly reaches cruising speed and readily passes traffic on tight roads. If you're already at a cruising speed and want to pass traffic, a downshift from fifth to fourth is definitely in order and sometimes you'll need to go from fourth to third. For comparison's sake, the Venture runs away from the Voyager in a fifth-gear roll-on from 50 mph. In fact, the Venture pulls away from the Kawasaki when the Yamaha is in fifth and the ZN is in fourth. To its credit, power delivery is smooth and strong right up to redline, and the Kawasaki runs happily all day long at 85 to 90 mph.

Using a lot of horsepower to move a lot of weight requires a lot of fuel— about one gallon every 35 miles. There's no drawback to the marginal fuel economy, assuming you don't mind handing over about a dollar more than a Venture rider does for a fill-up.

Far more important is cruising range. Since the ZN holds 6.6 gallons, it has an actual run-it-dry range of 232 miles, making it easily comparable to the Venture (with a 226-mile cruising range) or the Aspehcade (218 miles).

Living with the Voyager, you note many other impressions not solely applicable to its function as a luxury tourer. The Voyager incorporates a trick (and patented) two-part centerstand. To hoist the ZN, first slip the stand's legs down so they're brushing the ground. Then kick the trailing part of the stand down to touch the legs; that piece levers the bike up. It's about as easy as raising a standard 550. Nice. Getting the bike off the stand is more difficult; that requires jerking the bike forward like you really mean it. Other features include three hot leads for accessories (like electric garments). There's one behind the right front turn signal, another under the left grabrail, and another behind the right side cover.

The Voyager uses an updated version of the original six-cylinder 1300 engine, and the engineers modified it well. The '84 ZN features new pistons with a squish-shaped crown. The new pistons still yield a 9.3:1 compression ratio, and promote quick flame-front travel so well that even with its fairly high compression ratio the 1300 burns any grade of pump gas.

The updated engine includes a new clutch—smaller, lighter and more compact. Where the R&D guys could trim weight and maintain performance, they did. The new clutch (except for the short span of engagement) works well.

The old engine had an automotive-style harmonic balancer on one end of the crank to absorb vibration instead of allowing it to excite the loose-end of the long crankshaft. The new engine has a second alternator on the left crank end instead. The dual-alternator setup allows the ZN to produce spectacular wattage—300 from the primary alternator and 200 from the secondary.

Kawasaki has a fair amount of experience now with fuel injection, from the original Z-1 Classic and the first GPz1100 (both used electronic fuel injection) to the current GPz1100 and the ZN1300 (both use digital fuel injection). The DFI works much better than the EFI, thanks to some subtle changes.

With EFI, a swinging gate in the intake tract measured airflow, the rate of which dictated the duration of the squirt of fuel. (EFI does not vary the amount of fuel flowing per se; it varies the duration of the squirt, up to 6.0 milliseconds.) The problem? With EFI the gate created turbulence in the intake tract, resulting jn some hesitation off idle. DFI differs fundamentally from EFI by having no gate in the intake. Instead, sensors measure throttle opening, engine revs, air and engine temperature, and atmospheric pressure to regulate the duration of the squirt. It works well on the GPz, and it's effective on the ZN. Throttle response is instantaneous and crisp.

Engine aside, the Voyager is a new bike. The frame, its geometry, the suspension, brakes and, obviously, all the bodywork are new. New, though, does not mean different in concept. The decision to use the original 1300 engine as a starting point dictated what the Voyager would be—big. That original powerplant was nearly 300 pounds. Though the designers came up with new rolling stock, they didn't downsize; more to the point, they couldn't. A 300-pound engine requires a stout chassis, and that the Kawasaki has. In-

deed, to accommodate all the items Kawasaki believes will make this a gadgeteer's/audiophile's/touring rider's dream, the designers had to make it bigger yet, evidenced by the 2.3-inch increase in wheelbase and the need for larger components all around—the one-gallon-larger fuel tank, for instance.

That makes the Voyager analogous to the old 1300. Each is the largest example of its genre for its day, but ultimately it turns out that smaller machines, can do the same job better. In '78 sport meant speed, with ill handling something you put up with. It sounds like folly now, but the odd priorities were not so apparent then. Remember, that was when 750s were mid-12 quarter-milers and the CBX was king. The 1978 KZ1300, all 710 pounds of it, steamed through the quarter in 11.96; only a few bikes had done that before it. So the KZ was billed as a sport-tourer. Times changed quickly. Handling became paramount, especially when 750s broke well into the elevens.

Today many people understand luxury touring as comfort, and to get the comfort they put up with the ill handling. (Sound familiar?) But we are in the process of discovering that smaller machines can provide comfort and protection the equal of the bigger machines and handle much better.

The Venture Royale and the Honda Aspencade are the Voyager's direct competitors. The Venture was all new last year so we don't expect Yamaha to update it drastically. Compared to the Venture, the Voyager is slightly more comfortable (thanks to a touch better suspension compliance), has more luggage capacity (and here, more is better), and much better wind protection. It's also ill handling and comparatively slow.

Against the '83 Aspencade the Voyager is comparable, with roughly equal wind protection, luggage capacity, smoothness and power. It's harder to maneuver and less enjoyable on country roads than an Aspencade, but we could see a big guy putting up with it for personal reasons—intangibles. We do, however, suspect that Honda might react to the introduction of the Venture, which outperformed the Aspencade in a number of ways. A more powerful, better-handling tourer from Honda will widen the gap between it and the Voyager.

You can divide any category of motorcycles into 47 sub-categories (luxury-touring with a bias toward sport on slick downhill right-handers), but touring is touring. Of course compromises pertain (a certain shield provides either wind protection or optimum vision in the rain), but a carefully considered compromise does not launch a bike into sub-category 47-a. So for now the Yamaha is still the best touring bike on the market, regardless of its slight bias toward sportiness. .

The Voyager? It's exactly enough on the open road. When you're bound to run through a few turns on your way to the wide open plains, however, it's too much.