Styling

Headlight area, a key design element

According to the chief designer: “The area around the headlight is the key design element. Following the Design Planning Section Chief’s lead, we continued to develop and refine the design from that starting point. We created a clay model based on a sketch, then went to work shaping and moulding it. It took about two years from the start of development until the definitive form was achieved. And while the final shape is similar to what we started with, I think everyone on the design team will agree that the completed design perfectly expresses the bike’s dominating personality. During the design process we were always acutely aware that we had to live up to the expectations of hard-core Kawasaki fans.”

		The new ZZR is not only all-new, its stunning design makes it instantly recognisable as a Kawasaki and shares a family resemblance to the Ninja ZX-10R and ZX-6R. In the words of the Design Planning Section Chief: “One of the first decisions we made was that, like the other machines in the Kawasaki family, the new ZZR should have a centrally located Ram Air intake. In the early sketches the bike bore a faint resemblance to the ZZ-R1100. It started out with three headlights, a central projector headlight flanked with multi-reflector units. At the time, we were also designing the Ninja ZX-10R, which had two projector lights and two position lamps, giving it a 4-lamp design, so we decided to use a 6-lamp layout for ZZR. It was all rather a spur of the moment inspiration. To give the bike a flagship presence, we wanted
symmetry for both the low and high beam settings, so we used four lamps on low beam setting (two projectors and the position lamps) and all six lamps for the high beam setting. The 10R uses both position lights and one of the projection lights on low beam, and adds the second projector lamp for high beam. It is important for supersport bikes to look lightweight when the headlight is on, and headlight design is very important in achieving this effect. And of course, headlight design varies significantly depending on the category.”