Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

_M_o_to_M_o_r_in_i_12_0_0_C_o_r_sa_~_o _ first motorcycle to the products of what is likely to be one of its main commercial rivals, the thing you notice immediately when you first sit aboard it and thumb the starter is how quiet even this hard-used prototype's engine is both at idle when you first fire it up and out on the open road. There isn't the mechanical racket you get from many Ducati engines, whether Desmodue or Testastretta - none of the whirrs and rattles and general clatter that's always been part of owning a desmo Vtwin. The Moto Morini CorsaCorta motor, by contrast, is not only generally much quieter, it also feels more refined and seems, well, more modern in design and execution - a kind of next-generation Italian Vtwin engine. It has a subtly distinctive exhaust note, burbling to itself at idle with an offbeat lilt through the Termignoni exhausts on the prototype. Sadly, these will only be available as a track-day option when the Corsaro goes on sale next April, since Eur03 will require Moto Morini to fit those very ugly fat silencers on the show bike, which prompts the inevitable speech bubble, "Does my ass look big in this?" for any photo of the bike taken from the rear. The one-piece handlebar mounted to 50mm risers cast into the upper triple clamp of the 50mm upside-down Marzocchi fork gives great leverage, making riding the Corsaro in city streets or motoring it around tight mountain hairpins easy and enjoyable. That leverage is enough to counter the slightly slow steering geometry with the kicked-out, 24.5degree rake and 103mm of trail for the fork, which delivers the high-speed stability Morini was presumably targeting. Cranking the Corsaro around fast sweeping turns on the Autostrada del Sole heading over the Appenines to Firenze was extremely satisfying because it holds a line very well even over frost-ravaged surfaces or sealing joints in the road surface, and the quite stiffly sprung big Marzocchi fork and Sachs rear shock combined well to offer good ride quality while ironing out undue road rash surprisingly well, in spite of their stiff settings. The reason the shock wears quite a stiff spring is surely due to the meaty characteristics of the magnificent 1187cc Moto Morini V-twin engine, which not only has a wide spread of power (with a massive 140 bhp on tap at the crank at 8500 rpm) but also a huge amount of torque at almost any rev. There's 123 Nm (90.77 ft.-Ibs.) at 6500 rpm, quite enough to compress the rear shock unduly under hard acceleration if you didn't have that stiff spring. But the 107mm-bore motor pulls like a train from practically off idle: You can gas it wide open in top gear at 2500 rpm, and it'll pull hard and strong in completely linear mode all the way through to the fierce-action 9600 rpm rev limiter without a trace of trans- 32 MARCH 30, 2005 • mission snatch. This is quite unexpected for such a heavily oversquare, ultrashortstroke engine, which you would expect to have to rev quite hard to obtain this kind of performance. But while the motor apparently has a serious appetite for revs Franco Lambertini says it runs safely to 13,000 rpm (some going for a 107mm piston!) - Moto Morini has opted to limit it quite conservatively in these early stages of the marque's comeback, for reliability reasons. It is also content to lug along off the cam in traffic, then report for duty, ready for immediate action when you simply twist the wrist and ask it to deliver. This flexible and forgiving engine character means you don't have to use the gearbox nearly as much as you might expect with that short-stroke, since the CorsaCorta motor is especially happy to operate in the 4000- to 7000-rpm area, so you find yourself surfing the torque curve to hold a gear over a twisty stretch of road interspersed with short straights. There's an average of 1200 rpm between each of the evenly spaced top-three gears, and in fact, with this kind of engine performance, there's really no need for closed-up gear ratios in the six-speed extractable cluster - just point, and squirt, which is a pity in a way, considering how smooth and precise the Moto Morini's CYCLE NEWS gear change is. Like butter. Equally praiseworthy is the clutch, which, in spite of the hefty torque it must harness, is so light and positive in action and pays out so smoothly that you can use just a single finger to operate it. Imagine doing that on a desmo V-twin made by Moto Morini's fellow townsfolk. Since we've almost inevitably got on to the subject of comparing Moto Morini's Expect as many Morini customers to sign up for the Termignonis as purchase the optional track-day "silencer" from Triumph when they buy a Speed Triple. The 1200 Corsaro's meaty, muscular might makes power whee lies almost embarrassingly easy to pull - just wind the throttle in the bottom three gears. Topgear roll-on is excellent, too, with an extra dose of engine acceleration from 6000 rpm upward (as far as the 8500 rpm mark when the power flattens out) that is seriously intoxicating. Until they make an MV Brutale with the 1000cc motor, this rivals the Benelli TNT I 130 as the ultimate Latin musclebike par excellence, offering the best of both worlds in spite of its short-stroke dimensions - revs and rideability. It's also pretty smooth. In spite of the missing 3 degrees of cylinder angle - and thus theoretic inherent engine imbalance in the absence of a counterbalancer - in practice, the Moto Morini feels exactly like a Honda, Suzuki or Ducati 90-degree V-twin in terms of vibration ... or lack of it. It's also pretty fast for a naked roadster. J saw 7800 rpm in sixth gear, or around 230 kph (142.9 mph) with near-total stability. Only when I caught a blast of air from a truck's slipstream did I have the Corsaro's handlebar waving gently in my hands, settling almost before I'd noticed it due to the Ohlins steering damper. Sorted. Though it wasn't mapped prop-

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