Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128100
CLeft! The Mondlal is expected to be light very light. With a target weight of 385 pounds in street trim. tBelow) At the heart of the Piega is a Honda ReS1 V-twin engine. It sits In a spaceframe chassis that bears a close resemblance to a scaled-down version of a Ducati trellis frame, but with a much shorter wheelbase. (Bottoml Mondial has chosen to use Its own design of 45mm upside-down forks surprisingly, considering that Brembo is close by the company's headquarters - as well as the company's own brake package - a pair of 310mm discs that are stopped via slxpiston calipers. company never built any motorcycle larger than 250cc, and its sporadic existence wound down in the late '60s with a range of 50cc mopeds which Boselli promoted by sponsoring the Villa brothers in Italian road racing aboard their self-built twostroke specials - christened Mondials for that purpose even though the company's own race shop had been shut down back in 1958. But, a decade ago, the brand resurfaced, thanks to the enthusiasm of Count Boselli's eldest son Pierluigi, who developed a very competitive KTM-engined Mondial Supermono racer that enjoyed considerable track success, as well as a protptype range of 125cc two-stroke streetbikes, which never, however, made it into volume production. The Argentinean company of the same name producing scooters in some quantity today has no connection. Two years ago, the Mondial name was acquired from the Boselli family by 39-year-old Roberto Ziletti, a Brescia-based printing magnate whose privately owned Lastra Group is Europe's largest printing-plate manufacturer, and the fourth largest in the world, with five factories in Europe and India, and an annual turnover of more than $225 million from its 1000 employees. An unreconstructed motorcycle fan, who raced MX and enduro in his youth before devoting himself to a business career, Ziletti has long harbored a dream to own his own motorcycle company, and preferably one with a glorious heritage. "Moto Mondial sounds better than Moto Ziletti," he jokes, "and anyway, I always admired the Mondial marque's short but glorious racing history, and how the Boselli family pulled out of Grand Prix racing while still right at the top, undefeated. Now it's our challenge to live up to that tradition but instead in the World Superbike class, rather than smaller-capacity GP raCing. Although I'll admit to being a GP fan at heart, I strongly believe in the attractions of the Superbike class for smaller manufacturers such as ourselves, especially since it offers the chance to develop a range of products for street use, and is a cost-effective way of competing against the big manufacturers on an equal basis." To achieve this, Ziletti has laid plans for Mondial's revival with a sophisticated, limited-edition 1000cc V -twin sportbike called the Piega, designed by former Aprilia and Rotax development engineer Nicola Bragag- nolo. Mondial launched the Piega 1000 V -twin Superbike at Intermot 2000, but carefully left it to observers to spot - not all of whom managed to do so before rushing into printl - what was hidden within the bike's lightweight tubular-steel spaceframe, behind the distinctive New Edge styling's silver fairing, the work of young Italian designer Alessandro Mor. This proved not to be the ubiquitous Suzuki TL 1 OOOR motor promised in the pre-launch build-up, and on which the Mondial design had originally been based, but another, more illustrious Japanese fuel-injected 90-degree V-twin engine: Honda's 2000 World ;5uperbike-title-winning RC51 motor. This is the first time that Honda has ever agreed to sell engines to another manufacturer, however small, for installation in their own models, and comes /'lbout says Honda Europe chief Silvio Manicardi - as repayment of a debt of honor dating back to 1957, when Soichiro Honda was brave enough to ask Mondial's Count Boselli to sell and Honda R&D boss Heijiro Yoshimura to be photographed together with Ziletti and the Piega at the Mondial race team's launch at Valencia on March 10 - thus metaphorically putting Honda's hand on the project, which is sure to help the Italian team when Mondial enters World Superbike racing later this year. This won't stop Mondial from modifying the engine internally, which they plan to do with an altered combustion chamber and higher 11.2: 1 compression ratio, as well as their own Nimonic 80 reshaped valves and lightweight valve gear, permitting the redline to be moved 500 rpm higher than on the stock Honda streetbike, to 11,000 rpm, says Bragagnolo. The Italian company has also developed its own engine-management system for the Japanese 90-degree V-twin engine, incorporating larger diameter 60mm throttle bodies as standard (in order to homologate them for Superbike racing), with variable-length carbon-fiber induction trumpets whose operation is monitored by intake pressure. Also, there are new dual injectors per cylinder, one now mounted above and the other below the throttle butterfy (rather then both outside the throttle, as on the SP- 1), and differentially mapped so that, below 7000 rpm, only the lower injector functions, with the upper one coming into operation at higher rpm. Together with a 2mm-larger diameter 50mm exhaust system fitted with Shark silencers, these modifications will permit the customer Piega to deliver an extra 8 hp at 10,200 rpm, peaking 700 rpm higher than the stock RC51, says Bragagnolo - but with increased torque from 8,000 rpm up. The Honda engine is installed in a lightweight spaceframe chassis bearing an undeniable resemblance to a scaled-down version of a Ducati trellis him one of the DOHC singles with which Mondial had just clinched both the 125 and 250cc World Championships, in order to study the benchmark European technology Honda would be competing against, when the Japanese company made its own GP debut in 1959. The Italian nobleman agreed to do so - the Mondial is now the first bike you see when you walk today into Honda's Motegi Collection Hall - so when Mondial asked for the favor to be repaid with the supply of RC51 motors for the Piega, Honda apparently felt the only decent thing was to agree. The fact that supplying engines to what amounts to a stand-alone satellite technical operation pursuing a parallel 'R&D course which will expand Honda's technical feedback on the RC51 engine, doubtlessly explains the readiness of Manicardi cue I • n • _ so • APRIL 18, 2001 21