Trip Down Memory Lane: Kawasaki’s 2-Stroke Race ATVs

Team Green. Literally.

There may not have been a whole lot of them throughout the years, but Kawasaki offered a nice variety of manual clutch, performance based machines spanning the decades. Let’s take a look at the offerings.

Tecate-3

Honda may have beaten Kawasaki to the race-ready 3-wheeler with the 250R but Kawasaki was the first of any of the manufacturers to offer liquid cooling on their performance 250 2-stroke with the Tecate 3.

This rarity enjoyed 2 generations – the first with the odd high-mounted radiator and headlight stack lasting from 85-85 and the second just for model year 1986. In our opinion the 1986 Tecate-3 remains one of the finest looking production trikes of all time.

Tecate-4

The 3-wheeler ban landed smack dab in the middle of the 250cc racing days so the big manufacturers had to hurry up and offer four wheeled race options or be left on the sidelines. Strangely, while Yamaha did offer a 250cc race-ready 2 stroke trike (the Tri-Z 250), they never bothered bringing out a quad version (instead focusing on the 350cc open-class Banshee).

Honda and Suzuki did offer 250cc 2-stroke race quads, however, leaving Kawasaki little choice but to jump in the pool to compete even though their completely redesigned 1986 Tecate-3 didn’t even have a chance to recover its R&D costs.

The 1987-1988 Tecate-4 remains the most elusive of the major 250cc race quads even to this day. Known for offering an engine with more performance than its chassis and ergonomics could properly capitalize on, it remains the only quad to take a chapter from the contemporary automotive sports-car world with its pop-up headlight.

After a mere 2 year production run where it failed to make much of a dent in the sales of the Suzuki Quadracer 250 or runaway market-leader Honda 250R, Kawasaki pulled the plug on the Tecate dream altogether, instead focusing on the utility and trail scene for the next decade and a half.

Tecate 3/4

Perhaps the rarest of the Tecates you may encounter at a tack didn’t come from the factory itself, but rather came into being on account of a band-aid fix that became popular overnight when the CPSC crushed 3-wheelers into the ground over safety concerns by 1988. Companies began manufacturing and marketing four-wheel conversion kits that turned your trike into a quad with a little elbow grease and some step by step instructions. These weren’t pretty, as you’d imagine, but we still happen upon one every once in a great while.