Storied Italian Motorcycle Company Bimota Hits Another Bump In The Road
End of a dream created by Massimo Tamburini
By
Bruno dePrato August 31, 2017
Italian motorcycle company Bimota— created by
Massimo Tamburini with technical and styling excellence through his hard work and superb creativity—is almost completely extinct. The premises located in via Giaccaglia, on the outskirt of Rimini, are empty.
The Bimota sign has been taken down and the sight of it made me terribly sad.
My memories go back to the enthusiasm and passion that characterized the atmosphere at Bimota in the old days, when Massimo was carefully cutting, bending and welding chrome-moly steel tubing to create the most advanced and refined motorcycle chassis of the time.
Today, a sign says that Bimota moved about 100 yards from the old building, but there is only a 4,500-square-foot storehouse in a public storage building where they piled up the spare parts of the latest Bimota models, in particular the unfortunate BB3.
Only three or four people are working there. The present Bimota owners, Messrs. Daniele Longoni and Marco Chiancianesi, are Italian contractors living and operating in Switzerland.
They’ve moved all the components that would keep production alive for a few months to a shop somewhere near Lugano. This was confirmed to me by an Australian friend, Captain Niels Faerch, who ordered a Bimota Tesi 3 from his local dealer and who confirmed that the bike had been assembled in Switzerland.
Delivery time had been extremely long to the point that Captain Faerch was getting a little anxious about the final outcome of his purchase and related downpayment, but all turned out nicely. What will happen once the stock of components will be gone is a big question mark because it seems that all connections with the real Bimota tradition have been cut.
Bimota changed hands a few times too many, and this last time looks, well, final.
The sequence started after Massimo was stabbed in the back by his “friendly” partner Giuseppe Morri and forced to quit.
That was totally suicidal because Massimo unconditionally was the pillar of Bimota. He wanted to keep Bimota lean, agile, focused on R&D and on the production of a highly advanced frame and beautifully designed body kits, for racing bikes and for street bike as well.
There was a whole new generation of enthusiastic owners of super Japanese Fours begging for better handling, lighter, leaner chassis kits to harness their powerful engines.
Massimo poured his talent, passion, enthusiasm, dedication and technical knowledge to create each Bimota kit and the Bimota legend with them.
Success never diverted him away from his neat, sharp, humble attitude and style. He intended to evolve Bimota step by step with humble and cautious determination, and, most importantly, each new investment had to be carefully pondered and balanced.
This collided with Morri’s plan to make Bimota a fully-fledged motorcycle manufacturer producing complete bikes powered by those same, fabulous Japanese Fours.
This required new, larger, more expensive premises to store the dismantled Japanese motorcycles from which engines and instrumentations were extracted, while the rest was shelved.
Despite many attempts by Bimota, none of the Big Four was open to sell the power units alone. Here is where the financial problems of Bimota started and its decline began, because sales never fully compensated for the massive investments and the staggering costs related to the purchase of the complete bikes and to the handling of the huge stock of leftovers.
There was also plenty of bureaucracy related to the homologations of the new, street-legal models.
In my opinion, Bimota should have stayed lean as Massimo conceived it, progressing step by step, building its superb image through successes in the sport and the perfection and beauty of each new creation.
Giuseppe Morri, the bookkeeper turned CEO, proved inadequate to that position. He was too optimistic and ambitious to make Bimota grow fast, not paying adequate attention to the growing financial loads.
From then on Bimota kept resurrecting from multiple financial breakdowns and bankruptcies thanks to the dedication of a sequence of excellent project engineers who carried the torch that Massimo had ignited more than 40 years ago and that a sequence of inadequate managers kept dousing.
For me, watching the Italian Bimota factory shut down was very sad and I guess it would be to all who knew the real Bimota. The only hope is that some wealthy and capable entrepreneur will feel the urge of picking up the torch and restore Massimo Tamburini’s dream of ultimate beauty and technical excellence. Today’s motorcycling needs to dream again.
