Magni 861: The bike MV Agusta should have built
Riding the Dream Machine
January/February 2008
By Neale Bayly
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Owner Shane Chalke warming up the Magni 861 at Summit Point Raceway.
Photo by Tom Riles
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Just listening to Shane Chalke’s 861 Magni warming up as he blips the throttle sends the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. As he rolls up to greet us, the sound of the Magni’s engine shatters the quiet of his rural Virginia home with the most raucous, feral, mechanical shriek I can remember. For once in my life, I’m rendered speechless.
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Standing next to editor Backus, I notice we are gazing at each other with identical dumb, slack-jawed grins that communicate the mutual realization that we are sharing a motorcycle lifetime high.
Sound ideas
Shane continues blipping the throttle to get the Magni up to temperature, and as he does my mind transports me back to the vintage festival at the Barber Museum in Alabama in 2006, when I had my first real taste of the legendary Agusta sound. At that memorable event, Backus and I met "Sir" John Surtees, uniquely famous for being the only man ever to win world championships on both two wheels and four. At Barber we watched Surtees, now 73 but still competent as ever on the track, making parade laps on his MV Agusta race bike, one of the very bikes he rode to a world championship in the late 1950s.
As intense as that experience was, watching a legend in motion, and watching and listening as they warmed up his equally legendary bike in the pit area, I have to say Shane’s Magni sounds better to me.
Snarling through its four individual, handmade Magni GP one-piece exhaust pipes on idle, then winding up to a phenomenal crescendo as Shane roars off down his driveway, the 861 Magni MV has risen to number one on my chart of best motorcycle sounds, knocking off any bevel-drive Ducati with Conti pipes and Dell’Orto carburetors and even my old beloved three-cylinder Laverda: Shane should be selling audio CDs of this intoxicating Italian stallion making hot laps on the racetrack.
The Magni experience
Getting a chance to see one of these hand built Magni MV Agusta’s is one of the highlights of my 30 years on two wheels, and hearing it is more of the same — but readying myself to actually ride it is close to overwhelming.
I have ridden more expensive motorcycles, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the Magni is the prize of Shane’s personal collection. One of only a handful built, it is so rare, so valuable the thought of even scratching it has me quaking in my bike boots. Especially when the venue is West Virginia’s Summit Point Raceway, a track I have never seen, and one that seems to have far too many concrete barriers for my tender disposition.
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