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/128389
"B::-:j-m-o-ta-----=D--=-B---=S:-M,.--,---;jl/;-e---------------------- Latin Leprechaun Exquisite craftsmanship and Duck power saved Bimota's tail once before. Can these ingredients, in the form of the DBS Mille, do it again? talian is an expressive language, espe- I cially in terms of the senses - of art and beauty, of style and sculpture, of music and movement. What else did you expect from the land of Verdi and Michelangelo, of Giugiaro and Tamburini? The Italian world snella, as well, is a rich one, denoting not only a lean, slim, practically feminine build but also one which has racy, sensual, minimalist overtones of being stripped for action, ready to party, looking like it's already doing the speed of sound just standing still. A greyhound is snella, same as the Concorde or a Maserati Coupe... or Bimota's new DBS Mille. The DBS Mille is the first all-new Bimota model to emerge from the company's Rimini factory in five years and is thus the first product completely developed from the ground up by the latest iteration of the firm, now owned by pharmaceutical magnate Roberto Comini and his partners Bonini and Antonio de Benedetto. After taking Bimota in hand two years ago and reviving production of the Suzuki TLI OOOR-powered SB8K V-twin in order to clear outstanding stocks of Japanese motors, Comini instructed the firm's new 52 chief engineer, Alberto Strada (recruited from Aprilia's R&D division), to take Bimota back to its roots with an all-new version of the model that saved Bimota from its first dance with death exactly 20 years ago (there have been several since!), when co-founder Massimo Tamburini walked out to eventually team up with Cagiva and found CRe. That savior first time around was also Bimota's first Ducati desmodue-powered bike, the iconic DB I, and Comini and company will be hoping that the 300 examples of the similarly based DBS that are being produced this year will have a similar success, in spite of the usual stratospheric Bimota price tag, in this case $27,S99 plus local tax. That equates in Italy to $32,999 against a price tag of $12,999 OTR - on the road, tax paid, keys in the ignition - for the Ducati Supersport 1000DS powered by the exact same motor (but delivering 2 bhp more than the Bimota, presumably thanks to the Bimota's less efficient airbox and EFI package controlled by a Pegaso ECU rather than the stock Ducati Magneti Marelli system). Can any motorcycle - no matter how exclusive and loaded with AUGUST 3,2005 • CYCLE NEWS quality hardware like the DBS's Ohlins suspension, Marchesini Six-spoke wheels, and milled-from-solid CNC chassis components - be worth getting on for three times the cost of a comparable product powered by exactly the same engine? One way to find out was to ride it, so that's what I did. After visiting the revived Rimini factory to collect a DBS for a world-first road test, I headed off for a 300-kilometer day through the hills and valleys of the Marche region south of Rimini, coupled with a serious session of top-gear speed testing, carving a course through the trucks heading down the autostrada to Brindisi and the Greek ferries, and ending up with a scratch along one of my favorite biking roads, the Strada Panoramica, overlooking the Adriatic running between Cattolica and Pesaro, home of Benelli. The first thing you notice is that Bimota has packaged the rider incredibly well on the DBS, because most riders won't have to stand on tiptoe to clamber aboard, and at 32 inches, the seat height is low enough to suit those of shorter stature, such as women riders, and the eccentrically adjustable footrests will allow anyone to tuck their knees in tightly to the flanks of the shapely 17-liter (4.42-gallon) fuel tank, helping you feel at one with the bike rather than perched on top of it as you might expect with its compact build. It's snella but spacious. Indeed, it's surprisingly easy for even a taller rider to get comfortable on the DBS, in spite of the quite steeply raked c1ip-ons, which are, however, well pulled back. The low seat height means that you don't have a lot of your body weight on your arms, so the bars allow you to tuck in well behind the distinctive pointy screen, whose rake actually shifts a lot of air over your body when riding with a normal stance rather than flat on the tank. This is a surprisingly untiring sportbike to ride hard and long over fast, open roads, where you might expect windblast to become a factor; it doesn't. Instead, the Bimota DBS is a racy, radical-looking, sporty style-bike that's actually rational to ride and easy to live with. Sure, even on its lowest setting the footrests are pretty high and close to that lowish seat, but they have to be to give the ground clearance the DBS offers. With the twin exhaust cans mounted under the seat, absolutely nothing drags at quite extreme angles of lean. That's even with the relatively soft settings on the Ohlins suspension front and rear that you'll want to choose for extra compliance in real world road riding, in order to prevent such a light bike from skipping around over bumps and ridges in the road surface. Ride quality is improbably good for a cantileversuspended sportbike, though, and at slower speeds, the steering is light and precise in spite of the DBS's relatively light weight. However, I noticed that it definitely pushed the front wheel exiting a tight corner hard in second or third gear with a noticeable degree of understeer, which is probably the consequence of the newseries rear Dunlop D208RR hooking up well and helping compress the rear spring under the V-twin motor's added grunt accelerating hard in lower gears. It wasn't a factor in faster turns, though, where there's lots of stability, courtesy of the quite conservative steering geometry (24degree head angle, 100mm trail, 57-inch wheelbase). Steering lock is excellent by sportbike standards, making this an easy bike to ride in town if not for the inevitably stiff action of the Ducati motor's dry clutch, which will tire your left hand fairly qUickly, even if its action is smoother and take-up is cleaner than it used to be in the pre-Dual Spark days of graunches and clatters. Now it's just a harder pull compared to some other V-twins, that's all. The view ahead from the DB5 cockpit is dominated by the large, round, Bimotafaced tacho, which just stops short of being intrusive in the way it's positioned but doesn't impede your forward vision when you're flat on the tank. It has a combined digital speedo, clock, trip meter and stopwatch