Bimofa's Lorenzo Ducati and Giuseppe Della Pietra
The notorious marque's new owners tell all
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By
PHOTOS
clean balance sheet. After a couple of false starts,
that's what has now happened, with one of the five
groups of investors from Italy, the United States,
Great Britain and France, which had been targeting a
takeover of the company, now confirmed as Bimo-
ALAN CATHCART
KYOICHI NAKAMURA
By
A
fter a roller-coaster ride, which, even by the
standards of the Italian motorcycle industry,
has been an extremely shaky one, Bimota is back
in business.
Since closing its doors in June, 2000, victim of a
tangled web of tax losses, trading debts, corporate
shenanigans and company in-fighting, the fate of
the Rimini-based specialist manufacturer has been
in the hands of the bankruptcy courts, who have
had to sift through the remains of the troubled company to try to float it under new ownership with a
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APRIL 16, 2003'
cue
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ta's new owners.
Last November, the agreement was reached with
the court-appointed liquidator to buy the remaining
assets. Above all, these include the rights to a historic trademark created back in 1973 by conjoining
the names of Bimota's three founders - Bianchi,
MOrri and TAmburini, as in Massimo, the quintessential Italian design guru of the past two decades,
s
who honed his craft as the Michelangelo of motorcycling during Bimota's early years before going on
to create such two-wheeled design icons as the
Ducati 916 and MY Agusta F4. Bimota continued to
flourish after Tamburini's early '80s departure,
under the technical guidance of his successor Federico Martini and, later, Pierluigi Marconi, who jointly cemented the firm's stellar reputation for technical design excellence allied with race-winning
performance and groundbreaking styling. Marconiinfluenced products include the DB 1 (Bimota's first
Ducati-engined model, dating from 1984) and the
Yamaha FZ750-powered YB4ei, the world's first
