VOLUME 56 ISSUE 36 SEPTEMBER 10, 2019 P93
impossible, I kept hammering on at
them, and by the end, they were so
sick of me they agreed to do it as
long as I stopped bothering them.
"They thought the idea was ri-
diculous; they had these large lights
and couldn't understand why you
would want small ones. But they
were necessary for the design. I
feel the 916 is prettier with its lights
on than with a race fairing and no
lights."
Another visual trademark of the
916 is the massive 110mm twin
under-seat exhaust mufflers. Tam-
burini freely admitted the Honda
NR750 was the catalyst for the
design after seeing the legend-
ary Japanese machine at the 1992
EICMA Show in Milan. Up to that
point, he'd been trying variations
of side-mounted exhausts in the
same guise as the 888, but the NR
changed everything.
"When I saw the Honda NR750 in
Milan in 1992 I thought it was going
to be the future of motorcycling,"
Tamburini said. He didn't want to
straight-up copy the NR but was
happy to take the sharp lines of the
Honda and craft them for the 916.
"I didn't want the back end of
the bike to look refined," he said,
"I wanted it to look aggressive but
also classical. The two little exhaust
ports exiting under the seat looked
perfect. When I had done that, I
stepped back and knew the 916
was finished."
The design aesthetic may have
been something we'd never seen
before, but Bordi's four-valve des-
modromic motor was not as innova-
