They did know about that bike, at least a few years ago.
The bevel gear set is the highest stressed point in the entire drivetrain, and it was a new design for the C-14. Kawasaki went looking for C-14's in the field with the highest mileage; there were four of us who were contacted and asked to swap out our bevel gear assemblies for new ones so that the originals could be sent back to the manufacturer in Japan and reviewed for wear. The gentleman who I mentioned in the first post was the highest mileage C-14 they found and he had something like 80K miles on the bike at the time, one other fellow had something like 70K, mine had around 45K and a guy in PA named Jerry (JaminJere on this forum) had a bike with similar mileage to mine. They also took the final drive assembly and the ECU from my bike, again to review back at the 'mother ship' (the ECU records at least some parameters of the bike's running history so they wanted that too for the stored data).
I do not know if Kawasaki has made any effort to keep an eye out for any further data or not. By the way, my bevel gear set looked absolutely perfect and actually appeared to me to a lot less worn than I would have thought.
I don’t know what happened after that regarding the second highest mileage bike but the rest of us all still have our C-14s and the mileage is climbing on all of them. Jerry’s bike was somewhere in the 60K range last I heard and mine has passed 85K miles now.
Brian
Man... I wish mine lasts that many happy miles. Mama Kaw should be made aware of this accomplishment!