Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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INTERVIEW MV AGUSTA'S GIOVANNI CASTIGLIONI P96 No, neither of the two, I think that our typical MV Agusta customer is far above a poten- tial customer of the MT-09, so there's no comparison. That's confirmed by the fact that we sell more examples of the higher-priced RC than the 675 that's the entry to the MV range. Look at sports cars—you have Porsche making 150,000-plus cars a year, including 30,000 alone of the 911. Aston Martin makes just 5000 cars a year, targeted at the same market. One is more popular than the other, but when you want to buy a sports car you buy a Porsche, but if you are more sophisticated and can afford the extra, you buy an Aston Martin, and it's exactly the same with MV compared to Triumph or Yamaha, or even Ducati. I understand you've reduced the workforce here at the Va- rese factory? Yes, we had an extensive restructuring of the company, so that as of today we have 50% less structural cost than before. This including reducing the workforce from over 300 people to 190—we were overstaffed because we were structured to produce 10,000 units a year and more, and now we're going down to produce only 5000 annu- ally. We also outsourced our road racing activities in World Superbike to a private team owned by Andrea Quadranti, so it's a factory team, but is outsourced like all our competitors from Kawasaki to Yamaha. It's been very successful. We are regular top-five finishers in superbike with Leon Camier, and Jules Cluzel finished runner-up in the 2016 World Supersport series, in spite of some problems midseason. We were very satisfied with our rac- ing results in 2016, and will continue with the same structure in 2017, when I'm glad to say we've signed the American rider P.J. Jacobsen to race for us in World Supersport. How about reducing your R&D expenditure? You just said how high that had been, so what now? We've been investing about 20 million euro per year in R&D, but now we're reducing that to 5 million euro per year—that's already 7-8% of revenues, which is high compared to our competitors. But this is sufficient for us to keep our existing product range current, so we introduced Euro4 versions of all our existing models at the EICMA Show last year and to develop new products like the fantastic Brutale RR we launched there also, as well as a new F4 four- cylinder platform in the Sport and Super Naked segments. This will come as a 2019 model, not before, so we will launch it at the November 2018 EICMA Show. Will the new four-cylinder en- gine still be a radial-valve motor? No, because the new engine we made gives more performance with a parallel-valve format. It's a com- pletely new design, on which only the crankcases are similar to the current model. Everything else is new. We're going to start with the Brutale naked version, but we shan't be producing a new F4 for the time being because it's a high investment to make for a limited market, and our company can- not afford to invest in a flagship Superbike model at the moment. We know that a Brutale 1200 will sell very strongly, so we have to concentrate on that. "We said forget about cash for the moment, we need to change the structure of MV so we don't hurt ourselves fatally." Castiglioni has his eye on the U.S. market.