Kawasaki?s 1982 KZ1000R ? aka the Eddie Lawson Replica, or ELR ? debuted nearly 40 years ago but remains more desirable than ever. Photos by Kevin Wing and Mitch Boehm.

Precious few periods in motorcycling?s 120-some-year history have offered more radical change than the early 1980s.

You could call the period transformative. Or radical. Or revolutionary. But whatever you call it, it was freakingly, eye-poppingly, mind-blowingly exciting.

Eddie Lawson in action at Laguna Seca, and the motorcycle his dual AMA Superbike championships produced. Talk about iconic.

Up to that point you pretty much had basic big-bore motorcycles. UJMs, they were called, Universal Japanese Motorcycles. And some good ones, too. Honda 750s. Kawasaki Z1s. Suzuki?s GS750 came along in ?76 and upped the ante (along with the GS1000 in ?78), as did Honda?s twin-cam CB750F and CB900F. But for the most part it was still a tube-framed, air-cooled UJM world.
But as the decade ended, you had hints of what was to come. Liquid cooling. Four-valve heads. Sixteen-inch front wheels. New-think frame designs. And a lot more. New technology was coming, and everyone knew it. 

Sure enough, Honda?s liquid-cooled, single-shock Sabre debuted in ?82, and a year later came the perimeter-framed 1983 VF750F Interceptor. A year after that it was the sublimely competent Kawasaki 900 Ninja, and then, in ?85, Suzuki?s axis-altering GSX-R750. And on it went.

But let?s back up a bit. Kawasaki had impro...