The three men most responsible for Kawasaki's first AMA Grand National Twins victory at the Indy Mile - rider Bryan Smith, R&D tester Jay Springsteen and builder Bill Werner, here pictured atop the Indy Mile podium. (Larry Lawrence photo)

MotoGP and the tragic events of this past weekend somewhat overshadowed an incredibly important milestone in the history of AMA Grand National racing on Saturday night. Bryan Smith rode a Kawasaki Ninja 650-based flat track bike to victory in the AMA Grand National on the famed Indy Mile, marking the first time a Kawasaki won a Grand National Twins race.

To be clear this isn’t Kawasaki’s first Grand National victory. Yvon DuHamel gave Team Green that honor way back in 1971 when he won the AMA National road race at Talladega on a Kawasaki H1R 500cc two-stroke triple. Nor was it the first Grand National flat track win for Kawasaki. That honor went to Henry Wiles when he won the Springfield (Ill.) TT in May of 2008 on a Kawasaki KX450F. Smith’s victory was the first for Kawasaki against the dominant Harley-Davidson XR750 in a Twins races, or in other words on a Mile of Half-Mile AMA Grand National race.

The history of Kawasaki on the big Grand National dirt tracks is fairly limited. Erv Kanamoto built Kawasaki H2-based flat trackers in the mid-1970s. Scott Brelsford scored the first AMA National points on Kanamoto’s Kawasaki Triple on the Albany (N.Y.) Mile on Sept. 29, 1974. Kawasaki reached its high point in 1970s Grand National flat track competition at the San Jose Mile on Sept. 21, 1975. In that race two of Kanamoto’s bikes made the national. Scott Brelsford scored ninth, ultimately the best result of the Kawasaki Triple on the dirt ovals. Don Castro also qualified at San Jose on one of the H2s and was 15th.

Castro remembers racing the H2. “The things had so much power that the problem was the back tire,” he said. “It would just spin and chew up the rear tire, but once it hooked up we were probably hitting 140 mph on the straights. It was a blast to ride.”

Bryan Smith on the No. 42 Kawasaki leading in the Dash for Cash at Indy. (Larry Lawrence photo)

Castro went on to say that Goodyear was developing a bigger rear tire that would have allowed the two-strokes to hook up. “Had the AMA not banned those bikes I’m sure within a year or two the Grand Nationals would have been nothing but 750cc two-strokes. The tire technology was coming and there’s no way the Harleys could have run with those two strokes.”

With the banning of the two-stroke road race motors Kawasaki was out of Grand National Twins racing for over 30 years.

The now defunct Basic Expert Twins class inspired legendary Harley-Davidson tuner Bill Werner to build a relatively low-cost Kawasaki flat tracker. That machine became the basis for the Monster Energy Kawasaki Grand National entry. In 2009 the bike just missed making the main with Brock Schwarzenbacher. For this season the team signed one of the elite riders in Bryan Smith and suddenly the Kawasaki has been a consistent contender, culminating with the victory on the Indy Mile.

In interviewing Werner earlier in the season at the Gas City (Ind.) Short Track National, he talked about the difference in cost between his Kawasaki and a typical Grand National bike.
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Even though Werner’s Monster Energy Kawasaki was relatively inexpensive, is it a fair comparison to what a typical customer Kawasaki could be compared to the hours of R&D Werner, Jay Springsteen and Bryan Smith have done with the bike?
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Could Werner make a kit Kawasaki customer bike?
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Werner on what he’d like his legacy in the sport to be.
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Werner’s opinion on the long held notion that parallel twins couldn’t be made competitive in flat track racing.
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