Magni Sfida 1100
Magni Sfida 1100
. .From the moment the button is pressed to bring the big red machine tolife, the assault on your senses announces that this motorcycle could only havebeen made by one company. The starter motor engages with a resounding kerthump,the exhaust pipes thrubba a unique greeting, a blip of throttle sends the wholebike rocking to the right. The rider's-eye view of an enormous cylinder headpoking out from below each side of the fuel tank merely confirms that this is aMoto Guzzi.
Yes and no. The powerplant is a Guzzi Vee-twin all right, but the motorcycleitself was constructed not at the old firm's plant in Mandello del Lario butanother spiritual home of Italian motorcycling.
The little town of Gallarate, a few miles north-west of Milan, was put firmlyon the map in the 1950s and '60s as the home of MV Agusta, the most successfulbike-racing factory of them all. And the silver-haired gent beaming proudlythrough tinted specs as his latest creation is warmed-up is none other thanArturo Magni, legendary chief mechanic of the Gallarate fire engines whose 17straight 500cc world titles between 1958 and 74 embellished a period of grandprix racing domination that seems barely believable today.
The Magni name on this machine's tank stands for Arturo and his sons Giovanniand Carlo. For the last decade the trio have been building their own distinctbrand of Café-racer in the next-door village of Samarate, almost close enough tothe MV factory for the wail of an open-piped four to be audible - if only Agustawere still building bikes as well as the helicopters they produce today.
MV's loss is the Magnis' gain, and their latest creation is the Sfida: theChallenge. Its powerplant is a 90-degree transverse Vee as only Mandello makesthem; a Le Mans motor bought direct from the factory.
The look is unashamedly traditional, all the way from the spokes of the18-iunch front wheel to the rear mudguard. The aircooled engine, the simplesteel-tube frame, and the classical lines of the bulky half-fairing, the longtank and the simple seat - all finished in Italian racing red - give the Sfida atimeless elegance.
The appearance is a little deceptive. Look more closely, and you notice thatthe spoked front wheel is fitted not with some humble drum brake but with a pairof large, fully-floating and very contemporary Brembo discs. Four-piston GoldLine calipers bolt to thick Forcelle Italia forks whose tops hold knobs offeringa menu of five rebound damping settings. (At polished alloy, to which is the bottom of the leg,attached an even shinier bracket compressiondamping is three- complete with warning lights, a V way adjustable too.) 260kph (160mph) speedometer
The forks are gripped by a topand a big trad white-faced Veglia yokefashioned from a big hunk of tacho. Hefty round-section steelframe tubes run below the armpits of the sticking-out cylinders beforearching back to the swing arm pivot - or rather pivots, for this is wherethe really interesting stuff begins.
The swinger consists of not one but two alloy members on each side, the word"Parallelogramo" picked out on the top one giving a clue as to their purpose.BMW's Paralever
and the similar system adopted by Guzzi themselves on the new Daytona 1000are clever ways of reducing shaft-drive engines' traditional interference withthe rear suspension when the throttle is opened or closed. Magnis, you might besurprised to learn, were fitted with basically the same thing five years ago.
The Sfida's combination of old and new technology is deliberate. On the wallof the firm's office is a poster of the BMW-engine bike
they built in 1985. It wears an angular full-fairing, quite snazzy andadvanced for the time. But the customers preferred something more traditional.
"In Japan and Germany, where we sell many bikes, riders want their motorcyclelike an Italian bike of 20 years ago," said Giovanni, who at 31 is a year olderthan brother and business partner Carlo. "They want very good brakes and forksand so on, but in a style that they remember. That's why we designed the Classicand the Arturo, our previous models, and now the Sfida."
So successful has the new bike been that production, which commenced in Mayat a rate of 18 per month, cannot come close to matching demand. When I called,everything the firm's five employees aimed to build in the next four months wassold out. South London Guzzi specialists Rotadale, the British Magni importers,currently quote a six-month wait for anyone wanting to place an order.
The bike retails for £9300 in its basic form with regular Brembo discs andcalipers, or for around ten grand with the optional floating discs and Gold Linecalipers. Powerplant of the base-model bike is stock Guzzi from airbox toexhaust, including the 949cc Vee-twin engine from the current Le Mans, but an I105cc kit is available on request to boost the standard 948 twin's 80bhp-ishoutput by around lOObhp. (Rotadale boss Pietro Di Marino will also take ontuning work, from a £700 porting-and-big-bore job to full £2,500 blowout whichincludes modified pistons, a lightened crank and alloy clutch.)
The scarlet Sfida whose keys Giovanni handed me had the
I 100 kit fitted, and the big slugs hammering up and down inside the enginemade their presence felt as the bike shook and rolled in typical Guzzi fashionwhen I cranked the equally traditional heavy-action twistgrip. Riding positionleans you across the big tank to the steep clip-ons. Footrests are slightly morerearset than on a standard Le Mans, and give plenty of leg-room. The Sfida's afairly tall bike but, although not particularly light at 4301b, it felt quitemanageable.
We'd already come across its first major drawback, when lensman Goldcard andI arrived at the Magni HQ on the outskirts of Gallarate to discover that thebike was not registered and thus couldn't be ridden on the public road. Happily,salvation was at hand. Arturo picked up the phone, and one long call later hadarranged for us to borrow Pirelli's extensive private test ground down the roadthat afternoon. You got the impression they knew who Signor Magni was in theseparts.
Meanwhile I slipped out to get in some practice laps on the industrial area'sprivate access road. This was a narrow tarmac track comprising little more thana couple of straights with a hairpin at either end, but it ateast allowed me to confirm that the Magni patent parallellogram swing armwas the business. (Unfortunately for Arturo and Sons, those patents were notall-embracing enough to earn the Magnis a fortune from BMW et al for infringingthem...)
Booming up to the first gear turn at the end of the street, flicking downthrough the gearbox, banking left and caressing the brake lever with respect forthe gravelly surface, then dragging open the pair of 40mm Dellortos again comingout of the bend, was enough to convince me that the Magni swing arm systemworked just as well as other firms' later variants. The Sfida simply shot backoff up the road without a twitch from its firmish Koni shocks.
A further advantage is that the Parallelogramo has not increased thewheelbase, in the way that the equally effective Bee-Em Paralever has done. Orat least if that has happened, then Magni's otherwise fairly Guzzi-like trellishas compensated. At 1480mm the Sfida's wheelbase is actually an inch shorterthan its Le Mans country cousin.
Rake and trail figures are a fairly Lemon-like 27 degrees and I 15mm, andhelp give the bike much the conservative handling feel you might expect. Tipping the 18-inchfront wheel into a tight bend with a shove of the clip-ons was no problem,though by comparison with some current quickies the Magni's steering was a tadlaborious. Conversely, the bike felt so planted and stable that it would take ahurricane to uproot it.
Just as well, too, for after half-an-hour's enjoyable circulating I was justcontemplating returning to camp when the Guzzi's gentle chuffing was drowned bya fearful blast of sound that would have sent an RGV250 veering ino the oppositehedge. A large and very unhappy signora was announcing in what I took to becolloqual Italian that she's had enough and would I getta the hell out of herlife? I did, with a face to match the Sfida's paint.
Fortunately Giovanni then indicated that the Pirelli track was about tobecome free, so we strapped the bike into his van and set off for the provingground in the shadow of Malpensa, one of Milan's two main airports. The trackwas a brilliant place; all neatly laid-out handling circuits, artificial hills,water sprays for wet-weather tyre-testing and so on. When the last Pirelli-shodPorcshe had cleared off and the man in the cap gave the go-ahead, I gratefullynosed the Sfida out onto what was effectively an immaculately-surfaced privateracetrack.
We'd been told to keep to a short-circuit loop at the one end, which was nohardship, but I couldn't resist one quick blat up the straightish section togive the Guzzi's big lungs some exercise. Just off tickover the Dellortos were alittle spluttery but once the clutch was home the carburation cleared, the characteristic Guzzi low-frequency shaking - exaggerated a little by thebig-bore engine -smoothed out, and the Sfida thundered off like a rampagingrhino in a Jacob's Club ad.
The big Vee-twin's flat torque curve sent the tacho needle sweeping steadilytowards the 7750rpm redline as the bike headed for a top speed of around I40mph.Vibration and the old pushrod mill's clicketty-whirring increased a little asthe revs rose, but the Vee never failed to feel just like the relaxed,unstressed but wonderfully gutsy great lump it has always been.
The anchors, not surprisingly, where even more efficient when it came toslowing down. The Magni has no Guzzi-style linked system, just those twofloating-and-rattling Brembos up front and a smaller rear disc to help out.Grabbing a handful of Gold Line made the excellent forks earn their keep as theSfida stopped with enough force to make me think that a fatter front wheel shodwith something from Pirelli's current range might have been more suitable thanthe 100/ 90-section ribbed Phantom.
But the Sfida isn't trying to compete with modern bikes on performance oranything else. More importantly, navigating the circuit fortunately revealedthat the somewhat skinny Pirellis were not going to embarrass our hosts byproving the Magni's weakness. The tyres gave enough grip for the sound ofscraping centre-stand to demonstrate that the bike's ground clearance was thelimiting factor when cornering on dry tarmac.
Round and round I swooped in the sunshine, the restrained sound of the pipes(loud Lafranconis are another option, but don't tell the IMC) echoing round thetest ground as the Sfida was caned for lap after lap, my chin on the wide redtank as a sweeping right-hand bend unwound onto the heat-hazy straight, Iwatched the tacho needle unwind across its huge white dial and heard theengine's pulse quicken again as the machine surged forward on a torrent oftorque.
The bike may not have been a factory MV Agusta, but the Gallarate sunshineand the watching Signor Magni (Giovanni this time, thankfully without stopwatch)gave more than a hint of what it must have been like for Surtees or Hailwood totest a new racer 30 years earlier.
That's the great strength of the Magni Sfida: it's got performance, but mostof all it's got breeding and soul. Count Agusta's great bikes are just a memorynow, but Arturo and his boys are making sure that the MV spirit lives on inGallarate.
Source Bike 1990