Last weekend, I made a trip up to Boston for a wedding. I’d planned to ride up on my Suzuki GSX-8R, but a fresh deck screw in the rear tire just a day before the trip made a four-hour ride up in the rain seem untenable. Instead, I took the train, but I still needed a way to get around while in the city — a way that manifested in this, a tuned Kawasaki ZX-4RR I found for rent. It was one of the least comfortable bikes I’ve ever ridden, its exhaust drone at 4,000 RPM nearly made me late for the wedding when it drowned out my GPS directions, and its engine has absolutely ruined me for normal bikes.
The ZX-4RR, for the uninitiated, is a 399 cc four-cylinder sport-ish bike from Kawasaki. It’s likely the last of the North American-market small-displacement four-cylinders, in a world increasingly overrun by 270-degree parallel twins, and the example I rented had a slip-on exhaust and a tune that likely bumped that little screamer well above its 56 factory horsepower. This is somehow the first four-cylinder I’ve ever ridden, and its power delivery was so smooth, so effortless, that I’m hooked.
Not a review, just an experience
There’s a lot I didn’t love about the ZX4-RR, or at least the example I rode. The seat and suspension were punishingly stiff over Massachusetts’ crumbling roads, the foot pegs are too high for a 5’11” rider to be comfortable over long distances, and the Graves slip-on exhaust that this bike had was painfully loud. But the engine’s party trick, its 15,000 RPM redline, made all that fade into the background every time I twisted the throttle. This engine pulls, it wails, it’s just a fantastic little mill.
Now, how am I supposed to go back to my twin-cylinder Suzuki? I may not want a ZX4-RR for the type of riding I do, but I’ve certainly pulled up CycleTrader once or twice since my rental to ogle other four-cylinders. FZ6es, MT-10s, I’m now chasing the feeling of wringing out an inline four. I get it now, in a way I didn’t before, and now all I want in the world is to experience the pull of four cylinders revving their way to infinity again. This is how people become R6 owners, isn’t it?