Vetter’s Mystery Ship

There is a long history of short production runs and special motorcycles, and many of these dreams have wrecked on rocky shores when the reality of actual production costs has bitten. One such example is the Mystery Ship project created by influential American designer, Craig Vetter.

mystery machine

Vetter was already famous thanks to his stunning work on the Triumph X75 which transformed a good but often overlooked British three-cylinder sports bike into rolling art thanks to a combined tank/seat unit and all three exhausts splayed up one side of the machine.
He took this integrated bodywork design one step further with the Kawasaki Z1000-based Mystery Ship with a radical wedge-shaped fairing that swept back to a sculpted single seat and seat unit molded-in race number boards. Top-of-the-line Dymag wheels also adorned the bike along with Mulholland rear shock absorbers and a Yoshimura exhaust. Though the frame looked standard it was stripped of all unnecessary brackets and extra work was undertaken around the headstock area.

Six stages of tuning would be offered at source from mild to wild and an estimated 101hp to an ultra-exotic Turbocharged version which was envisaged in red over the standard scheme of white and yellow with red pinstripes – nicer in reality than it seems!
Sadly, even at the lowest spec, the Mystery Ship was three times the price of a stock Kawasaki Z1000 MkII and production ceased at 10 units after Vetter had a hang-gliding accident and decided to refocus his efforts on other projects. With one unit in a museum, there are potentially only nine other Mystery Ships in existence so a rare beast indeed.

What is not so rare is a huge fund of Kawasaki Z1000 and Z1/900 spares carried by CMS. Don’t let our service be a Mystery to you – look at our spares online and we will ship to you as soon as possible!