Is Kawasaki about to dress one of its most exciting bikes as a Bimota?

A new Bimota is set to be revealed this week, and it could be the Italian brand’s take on one of Kawasaki’s most exciting models.

Little is known for certain yet about the bike, but Bimota published a short video with the silhouette of a bike that is set to be revealed later this week on social media earlier this month.

As German publication Motorrad notes, the silhouette of the bike in the graphic is comparable to the shape of the Kawasaki ZX-4RR.

Kawasaki, of course, has owned 49 per cent of Bimota since 2019, a position it has most notably leveraged in recent times by replacing its factory ZX-10RRs in WorldSBK with factory Bimota KB998s, powered by the same engine as that found in the ZX-10RR but with a chassis designed by Bimota.

Kawasaki has also used its engines in other Bimota models since 2019, perhaps most spectacularly in the case of the Tesi H2, which takes the supercharged engine from the bonkers Kawasaki Ninja H2 and wraps it in an equally bonkers Bimota dress, complete with the hub centre steering system that has become synonymous with the Tesi range.

So, a ZX-4RR engine in the frame and bodywork of Bimota would not be something even remotely out of the ordinary for the Kawasaki-Bimota relationship. A new Tesi model seems to be off the cards, though, since the silhouette has no front swingarm.

The other model in the Bimota range at the moment – alongside the new Tera adventure bike version of the Tesi H2 and the KB998 – is the retro-styled KB4, but the silhouette’s reasonably sharp lines at the front of the fairing, around the air intake, implies something more like the KB998.

That opens the door also for a racing effort based on this bike, since a large part of the creation of the KB998 considered how it would perform in WorldSBK.

The Kawasaki ZX-4RR, with its 399cc four-cylinder engine producing 77bhp, has not raced at world championship level yet, and isn’t set to this year, either, in the new World Sportbike class, as Kawasaki has homologated a race kit for its ZX-6R 636 instead. 

The ZX-4RR has, however, raced in Britain, in BSB’s Kawasaki Superteen class, and this year will move into a new Junior Sportbike class that is based on the Sportbike regulations. 

Could Kawasaki, then, be about to use the Bimota brand again as a way to bring a slightly more race-focused version of one of its own production bikes to world championship racing, this time with the engine of the ZX-4RR? At the moment it is not possible to say for sure, but we might not have to wait long to find out – Bimota is set to reveal the new bike on 18 March.

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