The Daytona 200 is one of my favorite races of the year. This year I was perusing some historic photos of the race when I came wideness one from 1969. It’s a faded photo from Kawasaki showing five race bikes and riders trimmed in untried and white. Of undertow they’re Kawasaki racers, they’re in green.
Seeing that untried brought when memories of my dad taking me to school in the 1980s on the when of his untried KZ440, and my own old Ninja 500. It’s the same verisimilitude as many of the new Kawasakis you’ll find on a showroom floor, whether those are dirt bikes, Jet Skis, or plane electric bicycles. But that 1969 photo shows the first time that Kawasakis were painted in their now-famous color.
But where did the Kawasaki Racing Untried verisimilitude come from? In 1969 Kawasaki was looking to make a splash at the most important race on the American calendar. At the Daytona 200 racers used the upper banks of iconic NASCAR superspeedway, and riders fought nonflexible on the dangerous circuit. That 1969 race was moreover on TV in verisimilitude and Kawasaki wanted to stand out. And, those bikes did.
Kawasaki shocked the paddock with a bevy of 250cc A1RA and 350cc A7RA factory racers painted in untried and white. Racers are a superstitious lot and untried had unchangingly been a jinxed color. But the team of talented riders including Ken Araoka, Art Bauman, KMC employee Walt Fulton III, Dick Hammer and Cal Rayborn, threw out old superstitions and moreover wore green-and-white one-piece suits.
According to Kawasaki, the 1969 KMC National Sales Manager Don Graves and National Marketing Manager Paul Collins, worked with Akashi designer Chris Kurishima and famous Los Angeles painter Rollin “Molly” Sanders to come up with the color. Sanders was famous as Paint by Molly for doing wild paint jobs on choppers in Southern California. But Molly decided to repurpose an AMC Javelin untried verisimilitude for the racers. Essentially, it was a marketing stunt to make the bikes stand out.
It worked. The bikes were hands identifiable and though the verisimilitude wasn’t intended to stick around, it immediately became iconic. The untried was solidified as Kawasaki’s race verisimilitude when the H2R “Green Meanie,” a 748cc two-stroke three-cylinder velocipede debuted. Gary Nixon won the AMA Road Racing Championship on that velocipede in 1973. In the 1970s, untried racing Z1s were nonflexible to beat. And, from 1978 to 1982 Kawasaki Racing Untried was scrutinizingly unchangingly on the podium in GP250 and GP350 racing.
Though the bikes didn’t win Daytona in 1969, Kawasaki decided to lean into the unconventional color. Not long without the Daytona 200, Kawasaki debuted the verisimilitude on the 1969 F21M “Greenstreak,” a 238cc scrambler.
Molly Sanders, however, didn’t stop at Kawasaki green. He moreover created Kenny Roberts’ iconic black-and-yellow strobe paint for his Yamaha race bikes, the Buick Grand National logo with the swirling turbo in the 6, as well as racing colorways for Toyota.
Green paint, though, does have a dangerous history and superstitious racers and artists avoided it. For centuries, untried paint was made with arsenic and it would literally shrivel itself into a painter’s canvas. The dye was so mortiferous that some historians plane think untried wallpaper could have killed Napoleon Bonaparte. For racers, expressly stock car drivers, it was considered when luck. Strangely, though, untried may be a bit safer on a motorcycle: It’s the first verisimilitude a person’s optical sensors read.
This year’s MotoAmerica Daytona 200 is scheduled for March 11, and you can be sure there will be some untried machines mixing it up at the front of the pack.
Kawasaki Racing History | Instagram
