Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

to focus more realistically on getting the Tornado streetbike into production, rather than grapple with readying the under-developed racer for the transcontinental trips to Australia, South Africa and Japan. Which is how come myoid mate Gianluca and I instead spent a raceday Sunday morning reliving our many rides together along Racer Road during the past decade when he was the Bimota factory tester - but this time aboard the latest subjects of his R&D talents, both still splattered with flies from their high-speed, longdistance commute to the SBK paddock, and through the orange groves and vineyards of the hills behind Valencia, rather than the junior Appenines behind what used to be Bimota's Rimini base. Four hours spent surfing the highways at high speed aboard the Tornado triples provided a tantalizing taste of a bike which has the mark of turning out to be one of the great rides of the present decade - an opinion I'm sure customers around the world will share once they can get their hands on one, and benchmark it for themselves with comparable products. If Benelli can find a way of manufacturing the T ornado in quantity to acceptable levels of quality and reliability - which is to say, to Ducati/Aprilia standards, if not BMW or Triumph - and can do so while retaining the unique appeal of the Tornado as I sampled it, the company's present rocky future in the face of a collapsing scooter market is assured. Just that, as I see it, instead of trying to paddle their way upstream against the tidal wave of cutprice competition from Taiwan and Korea, they ought to focus 100percent on building a prestige family of three-cylinder motorcycles based on the Tornado's unique attributes. For what Benelli has created here is a motorcycle like no other - not even a Triumph, which its in-line triple architecture most obviously resembles. But no Bloor bike ever sounded or felt like the Tornado to ride - because this is a Latin triple, engineered with brio in Italy as the product of passion, compared to the perhaps more worthy but arguably also duller British-built bikes, which are so much more Japanese in character, without such a strong personality. Inevitably, it's the four-cylinder MV Agusta F4 that you end up subconsciously comparing the Benelli with - not just because it's so equally voluptuous and sensual from a styling standpoint (though arguably younger and fresher looking, perhaps a reflection of the age difference between Massimo Tamburini and the more youthful Adrian Morton), but also because of its comparable level of performance, even if they're very different bikes to ride. Because the Benelli talks to you in a way that few other motorcycles do anymore, not even the MV - or rather, as befits a bike from the land of Pavarotti (himself a Pesaro native, too, as it happens) and Verdi, it sings to you. Even in what I am assured is fully homologated, production-ready, street-legal, silenced guise, the Tornado is easily the most soulful sounding streetbike I ever rode, with a dulcet yet muscular wail at higher revs from the three-into-one exhaust's single silencer. The tone is enhanced by the meaty but muted roar from the three 53mm Dell'Orto throttle bodies in the airbox mounted in the front part of the fuel shroud. The 88 x 49.2mm 12-valve dohc engine was set at a fast 2000- rpm idle on both bikes, but the Tornado pulled hard and strong from that low mark while singing the unmistakable song of a trick triple - no question this is the best-sounding type of motorcycle engine ever made, and the Benelli confirms it. Acceleration down low is very good - the equal of a one-liter V-twin, with just a little less torque offset by a greater appetite for revs, in spite of the single gear-driven counterbalancer which completely does its job in eliminating undue vibration on the in-line engine with its 120-degree crank (or 240-degree, if you want to end performance to a Kawasaki ZX7R, only a better pull from low down. Compared to the MV Agusta in stock F4S guise, it seems much better again down low, only losing out at higher revs, even if there's no dropoff in top-end power en route to the softaction 11 ,800-rpm rev limiter. Riding the Benelli to something approaching its maximum potential requires you to work the sweet-action six-speed gearbox harder to keep it revving above that seven-grand power threshold - something that you catch yourself relishing having to do because of the glorious music from the engine which doing so produces. It's exactly the same as riding a Ducati 748 compared to a meatier, more muscular 996 desmoquattro, on which in the real world you don't need to change gear half as often to keep up road speed, a fact which makes the smaller V-twin a more satisfying road ride for connoisseur ducatisti. Same with the Benelli: It's down on power to the Suzuki GSXR750, and at around 370 pounds in road-ready production form not quite as light. But in real-world road riding, the triple is a delight, simplx because of the way it delivers its performance and makes the rider feel so involved in doing so. And the torquey bottomend pull, coupled with the progressive feel to the light-action clutch, makes it a good bike to ride on tight, twisty roads with lots of short straights followed by hairpin turns. Pace Erik Buell, it's a nice backroad bike... However, when you first throw a leg over the Benelli, you're not at all sure you're going to think that because there's no getting away from the fact that the seat height is really tall, thanks to the radiator mounted under it and the twin extraction fans in the tail. This is just about okay for a six-footer like me, but I have to say that anyone much shorter is going to find it hard to come to terms with riding the Benelli in town, since even I could only tiptoe at traffic lights, and making a three-point turn is more easily accomplished by hopping off crop, below) European Editor Alan Cathcart (pictured at right above) sampled the preproduction Benelli gOO Tre in Valencia, Spain, recently, proclaiming It to a fantastic machine with a soulful exhaust note that must be experienced to be fully appreciated. be pedantic: the 'big-bang' version Benelli experimented with at first has been junked - didn't make enough power). But then, at around 5500 rpm, acceleration becomes less meaty - while the Tornado keeps pulling, it's not so hard as before: not a flat spot, really, just that performance taHs off slightly, just as it does on the race bike at about 4000-rpm higher. But then, when the needle hits the 7000-rpm mark on the extremely readable yellow-faced tacho, the Benelli takes off again, with vivid acceleration all the way to the 11,200 rpm at which Pierluigi Marconi says peak power of 138 bhp is delivered at the crank. Honestly, if it wasn't for that haunting exhaust note, which gets higher-pitched the harder you rev the bike, you'd swear the Tornado was a 750 four. It has comparable top eye' e n e _ =os • APRIL 17, 2002 57

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