Morbidelli 850 V8
Ultimate eight-cylinder motorcycle
July/August 2006
By Alan Cathcart
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Photo by Kel Edge
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Years produced: 1997
Total production: 4 (including prototype)
Claimed power: 120hp
Top Speed: 150mph (249kph)
Engine type: 847cc four cam, water-cooled V8
Weight: 440lb (200kg)
Price then: $45,000
Price now: Who knows?
MPG: Does it matter?
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Ask any two-wheeled techno-freak for a short list of the most exotic motorcycles ever made, and it’ll surely contain the mid-1950s Moto Guzzi V8 500cc GP racer, as well as the 1980s Honda oval-piston V4 NR500/750 — a V8 by any other name, with its 32 valves and eight connecting rods.
But there’s another multi-cylinder maxi bike for the checklist: the Morbidelli 850V8 sports tourer that, after a decade of development, was on the verge of starting production in 1998. Unfortunately, after the first three customer bikes to meet a strong order book started making their way down the hand-built production line, the bike was disappointingly cancelled.
Two-wheeler achiever Giancarlo Morbidelli’s life story is a classic rags-to-riches saga worthy of Hollywood, an archetype of the breed of self-made men from humble backgrounds who turned provincial Italy into the mainstay of the country’s economy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Morbidelli was born in 1934 into a family of farmers, and started work at 16 as an apprentice fitter in a factory making woodworking machinery for the furniture industry, one of the two engineering specialties of his hometown of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Coast just south of Rimini. The other? Motorcycles.
Morbidelli started his own woodworking company in the late 1950s, but applying his innate technical brilliance after hours to tune locally built Benelli and Motobi bikes to a succession of race victories was his relief from the punishing days spent building Morbidelli Woodworking Machines into the industry world leader it would become by the 1980s.
Like many a race fan, Giancarlo’s ambition was to go racing with a bike bearing his own name. Yet, even for someone with his resources, the results of his efforts were awesome — especially given the modest nature of his homespun team. All the Morbidelli GP racers, from the first Italian title-winning rotary-valve 50cc tiddler built in 1969, were constructed from top to bottom in a corner of their patron’s Pesaro woodworking machinery factory, even down to the wooden patterns to make the engine castings. An accomplished, self-taught engineer, Giancarlo did much of the design work himself.
Rotary-valve Morbidelli motorcycles contested every GP class from 50 to 500cc at various times between 1969 and 1982, winning six Riders World Championships under the Morbidelli or customer Morbidelli Benelli Armi banners.
Given Morbidelli’s racing heritage, one might assume that the first street motorcycle to bear his name would be a hard-edged Superbike, a sort of two-wheeled Lamborghini. It was nothing of the kind, because Giancarlo Morbidelli is anything but predictable. Let him explain how the streetbike bearing his name came into being, only to die almost at birth.
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