Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

1/1 The ultimate hyperbike, By Alan 'Cathcart If the Moto-Guzzi 500cc V-8 of the fifties and the Honda 250cc V-6 of the sixties were the ne plus ultra of their respective decades, the accolade for the ultimate technical tour de force of the Superbike era of the seventies must surely be awarded to the Laverda I,~c V-6 endurance road racer whIch 18.. made one brief but memorable appear,ance in the 1978801 d'Or 24-Hour. Though riders Nico Cereghini and Carlo Perugini were forced to retire after eight and a half hours with a broken drive shah when lying a respeaabJe2Srd,thatsingiedebutappearance is the only glimpse the world at large has had of one ofthe most interesting machines of ilS age. For any plans the family-owned Italian company may have had to run the bike again were shelved at the end of that season, and though the world's preSs at the time made much play of a possible road version, this too never materialized. The Laverda V-6 thus remained for many, including myself, a near-mythical beast abollt which very lillIe of substance has ever been published. So on a recent visitlO the company's factory at Breganze, haly, in the Dolomite foothills above Venice, I took J. 1 t J J ~ .'" ... ~ 1 J: .:) the cha~ce tt? quI£Massi~oLaverda, who with hIS brother.Plero contr~ls the foTtunes of the fum whose IntereslS include agricultural machinerv and a high-precision foundry as well as motorcycles, about the six-eylinder prototype. I was rewarded with becoming the first journalist to learn the full story behind this remarkable bike, and when the sole surviving complete bike (two complete chassis and four engines were in fact constructed) was wheeled out of the factory lobby where it stands on display and was fired up (or me, I experienced the unique engine note which has never been beller described than by an observer on its only race appearance when he described its sound as being like that of "ripping silk," How did it all come about, I asked Massimo, and why? "Really it had nothing to do with the thought of ever pUlling a V-6 bike into production," he answered, "but at the same time we were coming lO the end of development of our twin and threecylinder road bike range and wanted ~ \ J' '\ I ~ I to research engineering ideas and aspects of design ,that might be applied to our next generation of Laverda bikes. In fact, I'm glad to say that the new four-cylinder range we shall be unveiling in 1984 incorporates many of the lessons we learned in the course of developing the V-6. It was always intended as a mobile tesrbed, and though, of course, we all said to ourselves how nice it would be if we ended up making a V-6 road bike as well, there was never any real question of it. It just goes to show that you shouldn't always believe everything you read in magazines! h would have been much too expensive and required a far greater financial investment for new tooling and so on than a small company like ours could ever have made." In fact, as Massimo also pointed out, the idea of uhimately productionising the V-6 would have proved hampering to the whole project. "If you decide at the outset as we did never to pUt it into production, you have complete freedom of design and experimentation, without the constraints of price or ease of production," said Laverda. So when the idea of building such a bike was first conceived at the beginning o( 1976, the design team had only to decide which concepts they wished to put to test. With no experience o( building a bike with more than three cylinders. the La- verdas opted (or (our or six cylind' but alsn wanted to experiment w' water-cooling, shah drive, electro c ignition, and the use of four-va heads in cylinders smaller than th of their 500cc twin, which alre boasted this feature. Put all r"RIWlJiIO ingredienlS together, and the V-'6 the resuh. ::l~ • The leader of the design t' -0, , • working in concert with longLaverda designer Luciano Zen, wit died earlier this year, and Massi 'Laverda, was oneof the most res~ names in automotive engineeri' , Ing. Ciulio Alfieri. Alfieri had work@l for both Ferrari and Maserati in lIle. past, designing the whole POStI ::l series of Maserati racing and sJXi':t q cars before the company was 'boug by AI~ssandro de Thomaso, wi whom he (~und it impossible to along with. The resuh wasthat Alfi I left the firm his name had becom W synonymous with, and for a handfd I of years worked as a free lance ellgineering consulant before takint~ '1 his pres~nt position as managinJi: director o( the prestigious Lam'borghini car company. 1 Massimo had been a friend of Alfieri's since the early sixties, when as an engineering student at Modena University, not (ar from the Maseratl works, he used to hang around thle test track before in time gaining admission to that holy o( holies, the design shop and testbed room.

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