VOL. 50 ISSUE 46 NOVEMBER 19, 2013
"Coming from outside the motorcycle industry, it's hard to understand how some suppliers
completely fail to live up to their
promises," he says. "Either they
don't deliver on time, so you have
100 bikes sitting there without
an exhaust, or they make a horrible object, so you must find a
new source – as was the case
with our previous exhaust supplier. Three months lost for noth-
ing. Anyway, at last we are ready
with the Rebello, and I can only
apologize to our customers who
purchased one, and have had
to wait so long to receive it. But
soon, they will!" Well, better late
than never, I guess, although the
Giubileo ('jubilee') tag hung on
the model's name, plus the various stickers announcing Morini's
75th birthday, were a little out
of date on the black and white
Rebello I found awaiting me in
the courtyard of the spruced up
Morini factory in Casalecchio di
Reno.
But there was a good reason
that Capotosti allowed me to get
on the bike before anyone else
outside the company…. I own a
Moto Morini. Yes, I'm often asked
what bike I own, which one I ride
whenever I don't have a test model on loan from someone, and
the answer often confounds the
asker. For as the satisfied owner
of a Moto Morini Corsaro 1200
that's still just as exhilarating and
plain good fun to ride as it was
the day I got it in 2007.
And when the closure of the
Morini factory was announced in
2010, I went and bought another
one. Not only was I concerned I'd
be left without a bike to make me
smile, it also meant that my son
Andrew had one of his own rather
than always taking mine.
So as a satisfied Morinista, the
chance to ride the first new model of the Eagle Bike era not only
allowed me to assess this radicallooking bike – with styling that will
provoke either a love or hate for
P65
many – but also to check out any
improvements over my own two
Morinis (the '07 model and the
2009 model – the last made by
the previous owners).
Indeed, my first 400 yards
aboard the Rebello on the outskirts of Bologna brought an instant smile to my face. For the
new bike delivers an enhanced
version of the established benefits of the CorsaCorta engine
I've grown to love, combining the
eager appetite for revs of a heavily over-square, ultra short-stroke
motor measuring 107x66 mm,
with an improbable amount of
torque for such a design.
You can gas the Rebello's
CorsaCorta engine wide open in
sixth gear at 2500 rpm, and it'll
pull hard and strong in completely linear mode all the way through
to the fierce-action 9300 rpm
revlimiter. And without a trace of
transmission snatch. This is quite
unexpected for such a shortstroke engine format, which
you'd normally expect to have to
rev quite hard to obtain this kind
of performance.
And while the powerplant has
a serious appetite for revs, designer Franco Lambertini says it
runs safely to 13,000 rpm (not
bad with a 107mm piston!) and it's
also content to lug along off the
cam in traffic.
The current engineering team,
led by former Ducati man Alberto
Tarroni, has also refined the power delivery via detail changes to
the engine mapping, resulting in
a more fluid, more progressive,
