Danger Zone: Federal Moto’s Kawasaki GPz1100

The year is 1986, and Tom Cruise is playing Maverick in Top Gun—flying an F-14 Tomcat by day and tearing around on a Kawasaki GPZ900R by night. If you fell in love with that film and the bike ridden by its motorcycle-mad star, you’re not alone. “We all know that movie,” says Michael Muller of Federal Moto. “And we always knew that when Federal Moto built its first custom sportbike, we’d need the beefiest bad boy of the 80s: the GPz1100.” The GPz1100 was the older, bigger brother of the Ninja 900, and the Chicago shop managed to secure a...