MV Agusta Brutale 800RR
Do you believe in love at first sight? No, well neither do I, but if I did, I’m pretty sure I would be getting down on one knee and asking the MV for its handlebar in marriage (I’m sure it’s legal to marry a bike in some states in the US). It really is a stone-cold stunner with its sharp lines, diamond-cut aluminium wheels and ‘organ-pipe’ silencers, so as soon as I saw this red and black (well, pearl shock red/metallic carbon black) beauty, I was desperate to get my leg over (no change there then) to see if the riding experience could live up to the MV’s delivishly good looks and whopping £13,490 price tag.
Aloft the MV, I felt as though I was perched right towards the front of the bike with quite a lot of weight going through my wrists and hands. I tried to shuffle around to make myself a little more comfortable but the strangely shaped seat wasn’t very obliging. My comfort levels were very quickly forgotten about when I fired the RR’s engine up, though. I never knew that a Euro 4 compliant bike in showroom trim could sound so menacing, but it can. The MV is a bike that sounds as good as it looks, despite on the odd occasion the fuelling feeling a little less than perfect and hunting a bit at low revs.
And if aesthetics and audio aren’t enough to excite you then wait till you’ve taken the MV for a blast. From the get-go the engine felt light and revvy and its full throttle howl egged me on to use all of its 13,000rpm, all the time. One peculiar trait of the Brutale was its un-rev-limiter-like rev-limiter. Rather than the typical ‘ba ba ba ba ba’ that most of us redline addicts have come to expect, the MV’s revs just stop increasing with no real change in sound, so revving out sometimes went unnoticed for a split second or two.
The RR’s light feeling engine is accompanied by a chassis to match. It feels light and nimble on the road and the riding position, slightly uncomfortable though it may be, gives the bike a good dose of sportiness. On our long and varied test route nothing ever felt too sketchy through the fast or the slow stuff. The problem with the MV isn’t that it’s not agile enough, it’s that it’s almost too agile; by that I mean when you’re hunched over the RR’s ’bars in what doesn’t feel a million miles away from a ‘racing crouch’ the bike always seems to be looking for the next corner, and it’s ready to drop into it at a nanosecond’s notice – it’s great fun but this agility is really to the detriment of the bike’s stability and on our test it sometimes felt a little flightier than you might expect from a naked middle-weight such as this.
What you also mightn’t expect from this category of motorcycle is such an impressive quickshifter and blipper system. Okay, quickshifters are ten a penny these days and it’s usually the first thing a manufacturer will throw at their ‘premium’ spec models, but a little less common is a blipper. And even
less common still is a blipper that works so sweetly. There is a fair amount of slogger on the shift lever, I’ll give you that, but the electronics seem to aid the mechanics of every single gear change perfectly and as an added bonus you’re treated to a little pop on every upshift and a uniform blip on every downshift. Nice.
While we are on the subject of electronics, it’s worth mentioning the eight level traction control, which is probably a little excessive, although on the lowest setting, you did have to give it some welly to get it to kick in. The TC system can, of course, be turned completely off, the only problem with that is you have to look at the appallingly dated dash and scroll all the way through its systems using the cheap looking (and feeling) buttons on the left hand switchgear. And the dash isn’t just dated, it’s a bit rubbish too.
The warning lights and stuff appear on a black panel just below the main display; well, when I say appear, you will need your bifocals on if you want to see them, and even then you’ve got your work cut out to read what they actually say. I think someone needs to remind MV Agusta’s dashboard department that it’s 2018.
If you can bear to look at the dash for any longer it’s worth turning the ABS off too. The Brembo brakes (front and back) on the MV are fantastic but I found the ABS a little too intrusive for my liking. With ABS deactivated, big stoppies and long skids were more than catered for on the MV, but what made me really happy was the fact that when you turn the ignition off for any period of time, the bike would remember what you’d turned off, rather than defaulting to a ‘safe’ setting, with all the aids turned back on.
MV Agusta are certainly making a statement with the styling of the new Brutale, but at £13,490 it’s very much at the deep end of the price pool. If its value you’re after then you might want to read on…