Target Design: In Conversation with Hans-Georg Kasten

Hans-Georg Kasten was one of the three men at Target Design who were responsible for designing the 1980s Suzuki Katana. He is now the Managing Director of Target Design 

Launched in 1981, the Suzuki Katana 1100 had relatively conventional mechanicals – the engine, chassis and suspension were pretty standard for its time – but the styling was radical, and made the motorcycling world sit up and take note. The bike was Japanese, of course, but was designed in Germany by Target Design. There was a three-man team that worked on the Katana’s design: Jan Fellstrom, Hans-Georg Kasten and Hans Muth. Back in 2012, I had an opportunity to do a brief interview with Hans-Georg Kasten, who is now Managing Director of Target Design. Here are some excerpts from that conversation.

Suzuki Hayabusa: Death Metal

Back in 2016, the editors of Motoring World magazine arranged for me to keep a Suzuki Hayabusa for 2-3 days and ride it to my heart's content. The experience was quite unforgettable

It was early-2016 and I had just moved from Pune to Greater Noida. I had been working with MV Agusta in Pune, a very short stint that barely lasted three months. I had moved to Greater Noida in search of work, hadn’t found anything and was bored out of my mind. One day, I was talking to Kartik, at Motoring World magazine, and asked if he could arrange for me to ride or drive a really fast machine, since it had been quite a while since I’d had a go on anything with a few hundred horsepower. Kartik asked me if I’d be interested in doing a story on the Suzuki Hayabusa and, of course, I jumped at the opportunity. Here are some excerpts from the piece I wrote for the magazine:  

With a top speed of about 300kph, the Suzuki Hayabusa can keep up with just about anything on two wheels. At least in a straight line. And that’s nothing short of amazing, because the Hayabusa, which was launched back in 1999, is now all of seventeen years old. To give you some perspective on how old that really is, 1999 was when the Euro was first introduced, Keanu Reeves starred in the first Matrix movie, the Khmer Rouge was officially disbanded in Cambodia, movie DVDs were still a novelty and listening to music meant buying a CD rather than downloading an MP3. Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp hadn’t been invented yet, and people used to have actual face-to-face conversations rather than only chatting on WhatsApp, can you believe that?