![]() ![]() Wirges was kind, friendly and patient, giving them a tour of his operation, looking each of their bike over and giving free tuning advice. Showing up unannounced, the Kawi triple riders found that Mr. In the mid-1970s a group of Wirges enthusiasts from a Kawasaki dealership in Minnesota made the pilgrimage to Bill’s shop in Illinois, all of them on different flavors of Kawasaki triples. While nearly all of his competitors and on-track rivals have folded or gone to the big flow bench in the sky, Wirges-in his 80s now-still goes to his shop most days and is a great proctor of what it took and takes to make a Kawasaki two-stroke sing. Bill Wirges with “Our Thing” on the Bonneville Salt Flats. His tuner pipes were fitted to tens of thousands of H2s at an time when two stroke hop-up was more black magic than any kind of loose or applied science. It was, he says now, “The bike that made me dream.”īill Wirges and his company “Bill Wirges Inc” rode the wave of 1970s Kawasaki two stroke performance parts. MotoGP team owner Herve Poncharal, who has had multiple V4 500cc two stroke GP bikes and thundering MotoGP four-strokes in his team’s garage, still says the Kawasaki triple remains his favorite race bike. However, for a generation of riders the exhaust note of a “Kawi-triple” is the be-all and end-all of magnificent exhaust notes. Okay, sure, any post-2009 Craigslist roach R6 will humble an H2 in just about any contest of performance. ![]() Maybe it was the era or maybe it was the beer, or maybe the beer and the era but here we are in 2017 and the sound from the Kawasaki H2 still makes heads snap to attention. If the motorcycle industry ever collected items to be shot into space so that they might later hopefully found by martians–a la the Voyager record–an audio file of the snarling crackle from a Kawasaki H2 750 with expansion chambers would undoubtedly be included in the cask. He was working on a project bike up until he passed at 84. Frankly, Bill probably didn’t care how they did it in California. However, he was from Illinois so, of course, no dubious gold jacket fame or AMA Hall of Fame nod. If Bill had been from anywhere in California he’d have been widely celebrated as an innovator and pioneer in motorcycle racing. Editor’s note: looks like Bill Wirges passed away in 2019, after I purchased a bike from him. ![]()
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