Previewing in Toronto, Ontario by Appointment. Please contact [email protected] for scheduling.

'It's a classic.' With those words Bike magazine concluded its glowing road test of Suzuki's GSX1100 Katana in February 1984, noting that, despite having been around virtually unchanged for three years, the big Suzie was still the undisputed 'King of the Street'. With a best one-way of 143mph, the Katana had the legs of rivals such as Kawasaki's GPz1100 and Laverda's Jota, while a standing-quarter run of 11.13 seconds demonstrated that there was no lack of bottom-end grunt.

Styled by the German firm of Target Design under the direction of Briton Jan Fellstrom and first seen at the 1980 Cologne Show, the Katana represented a bold effort to produce an uncompromising sports bike in the European mould. The result was a machine that combined straight-line speed with secure handling like no Japanese bike before it. The concept's immediate success confirmed the wisdom of Suzuki's policy of introducing a family of similarly styled machines across just about every capacity class, though some may have wondered why there was a 1,000cc version as well as one of 1,100cc. In fact, the former was only included to ensure the model's homologation for production racing in the up-to-1,000cc class and nowadays is considerably rarer than the '1100'. The speedy elevation of the original Katana to the ranks of motorcycling style icon prompted the reintroduction of the model in Japan in the 1990s, though the second-generation version had to make do with 96bhp rather than the original's 111 horses.

The Katana presented here belongs to a large collection of motorcycles located in the surrounds of Toronto. It appears to be in good original condition showing 21 000km (about 13k miles).