Gordon Clive Pantall started racing in 1964 at nearby Aberdare Park although it wasn’t the best of starts as the young welsh rider crashed in his first event. The bug had bitten hard however and Gordon quickly got to grips with staying on and aiming for the front.
Kawasaki has had a fleeting romance with premier class of GP racing over the last thirty odd years or so, first of all during the early seventies with Dave Simmons and Ginger Malloy on the air-cooled, roadster based triples and then with a full on radical design for a short period during the turn of the eighties before returning in more recent times with a four stroke Moto GP machine.
Riding the Foale framed machine back to back with the virtually standard chassis race bike was quite an eye opener. The same day of this test I had also thoroughly enjoyed punting a relatively standard Z1 around the fast and challenging Mallory Park circuit and treated its foibles as simply the way seventies bikes went about their job.
