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Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128161
Aprilia RSV Mille Haga By ALAN CATHCART PHOTOS BY TINO MARTINO N ormally, when a manufacturer launches a top-of-the-Iine sportbike dressed to kill in the colors of its factory Superbike team, it's for one or more of three different reasons, any of which helps justify spending all that money going face-to-face with their rivals in the white heat of close-quarter track combat. Either they're doing a Ducati and homologating the next-up revised version of the bike that's the basis for their World Superbike contender, so as to be allowed to incorporate the fruits of ongoing research and development into the racer, sometimes for extra performance, sometimes just to make the rider happy (Le. the Fogarty replica 996's different-shaped fuel tank, which allowed Carl to get the riding position he wanted). Or else they're deriving commercial benefit from the victories achieved out on the racetrack with said Superbike, by selling a close street replica of the racer it spawned, often with Superstock supremacy in mind - a genuine racer-with-lights. Or, finally, there's the chance to flick a finger at the competition by celebrating a championship title with a streetbike painted up to look like the one that did the business -. like Ducati did last year with the Troy Bayliss-spinoff 998, Kawasaki did two decades ago with the Eddie Lawson Replica, and loads of others have done in between. Or all of the above. 28 JULY 3, 2002' cue • • Or none - as is assuredly the case with the so-called Aprilia RSV Mille Haga sportbike unveiled by the Italian manufacturer at Monza recently - at the World Superbike round there in which Noriyuki Haga suffered a nonfinish with a broken water pump in the first race before storming to a superb podium finish in race two. For not only is the Sumurai of Slide still yet to score his debut race win for the Italian company, whose Superbike race effort has this season been downgraded to just a single rider on a bike run by a satellite squad, the fact is the Haga RSV-R streetbike is neither a close replica of Haga's racer, nor a homologation special aimed at giving him a crucial extra level of specification aimed at getting him to the checkered flag first. It's a lookalike, not a replica. The reason for this is that, while superficially similar to the company's range-topping RSV Mille R streetbike, n __ s which, like all other Aprilia V-twin models currently in production, employs the longstroke 97 x 67.5mm 998cc version of the 60-degree Vtwin eight-valve motor developed in conjunction with Rotax and manufactured by them in Austria, Haga's works Aprilia RSVI000 Superbike racer is as different as oranges are from grapefruit - since it's in fact based on the limited-edition Mille SP homologation special with Cosworthdeveloped 996cc race engine measuring ]00 x 63.5mm (dimensions which Aprilia was the first to adopt almost four years ago, before being copied first by Honda with the RC51, then Ducati with the first Testastretta). Just 150 versions of this motorcycle were built in 1999, specifically in order to homologate it for World Superbike, complete with a special race chassis permitting the engine location to be varied for optimum handling - a feature derived from Aprilia's world-title-winning GP racers, which no other Superbike presently offers. No further examples of the Mille SP have been built since that initial 150off batch over three years ago, making this by some way the rarest Italian sportbike of the modem era. Quite a collector's item, in fact. Which made it frankly rather a disappointment that, when I showed up at Monza three weeks after its World Superbike debut weekend to ride the RSV Mille Haga streetbike, just 300 examples of which Aprilia are manufacturing in a single, individually numbered batch, I discovered this sadly not to be the long-awaited second coming of the short-stroke SP Mille, but a reclothed version of the company's top-of-the-line Mille R long-stroke model. Really, it's just dressed up to look like what it isn't (in spite of the claims in the Aprilia press kit) - namely a Haga r~plica. Instead, for its quite reasonable $15,900 price tag in Italy against th~ $14,700 for the stock Mille R, the RSV Mille Haga offers are-liveried version of the volume-production Rmodel, complete with that bike's Ohlins race suspension, OZ wheels, top-drawer Brembo brakes with braided-metal hoses (but not with radial-caliper mountings like on the works racer, though) and a stock RSV-R aluminum twin-spar frame with fixed engine position, so no chance to move it around within the chassis, like on the short-stroke SP. To personalize it, each Haga model comes with a blue-anodized lightweight upper triple clamp carved from a solid billet of Ergal aircraft alloy, and bearing not only the build number of the bike itself, but also Nori-chan's autograph carved into it with an electric pencil - but in Western script, rather than Japanese characters. Maybe they should have had him sign off the matt-black top of each bike's 4.68-gallon fuel tank in Japanese with an orange marker pen - or is that going to be left for the Sultan's subjects to try to persuade him to do in person at races or test days? However, as well as the added show, there's also more go, in the shape of a track kit supplied with each RSV Haga which has been developed by the company's inhouse R&D team led by Marino Fioravanzo, the man responsible from its very earliest days for the evolution of Aprilia's 60-degree V-twin engine, in all its various forms.