SUZUKI GS1000S
Dean Stevenson rescued a garden-find wreck and transformed it into a GS1000S with Wes Cooley cool. We get the gen on the job – and take it for a spin
It’s difficult to believe that Dean Stevenson’s 1979 Suzuki GS1000S stood outside in wind and weather for more than a decade before he bought it. His restoration transformed a sorry and neglected wreck into a glorious piece of late 1970s big-bore sportsbike delight – as the ‘before and after’ photographs you see on these pages confirm.
Dean is a man of disarming modesty, though. Rather than showboating about what he did to his cool ‘Ice Cream Van’, he first reveals his deep association with the GS – and Suzukis in general. It seems it all started during his early career as a motor mechanic.
“I had a red-and-white GS1000S back in 1980 or ’81 when I was 20 years old,” he says. “There was something special about that bike. It had come from Heron Suzuki, I believe, and had been a press demonstrator. I needed a head gasket and a standard one wouldn’t fit. My local dealer, the now defunct Granby Motors had to send off to Japan for one.”
Special though his first GS was, Dean traded it in for another Suzuki. “I bought a GSX-R750 when they came out in 1985. To me, I traded in what I see as the first Japanese race replica – Wes Cooley and all that – for Suzuki’s next competition-bred offering.” Despite his pursuit of the newest great thing, memories of the GS persisted. “I always thought I would have another,” he says.
Sportsbikes came and went – among them a fair few GSX-Rs of all generations, through Slabbie and Slingshots via the SRAD up to the last injected models. There was a Yamaha R1 in the Stevenson shed at one point, too. All did their fair share of miles, being hammered around the roads of Derbyshire and on trackdays at Mallory and Donington, where Dean was an instructor.
Dean’s latent desire to own another GS1000S became reality late in 2017. “I hadn’t planned on a project; I was looking to buy a complete runner. But there was nothing around at the time. I realised that if I was going to have a GS, I would have to buy something and rebuild it. I’d never done a restoration before, but as a qualified motor mechanic and having done a few race engines for people down the years too, I thought I could have a reasonable go at it,” he says, with admirable understatement.
A tip-off from a friend put Dean on the scent of a 1979 GS1000S project bike for sale near Birmingham, so he set out to take a look. The bike had been standing in a garden for a decade or two, and if le
