Adrian Morton
‘Adrian Morton himself has come a long way since he was a student in London, having ridden his Honda Benly 200 from his home in Norwich in eastern England. Now aged 50, he has lived in Italy for half his life, during which time his work at Cagiva, Benelli
The man behind some alluring street-naked designs
It is a dull winter day in san Marino but adrian Morton is in good spirits. He takes his laptop to the window to demonstrate the spectacular view that his office commands towards rimini and the adriatic sea (we are talking via Zoom, obviously), then pulls out his phone to send me an image that he remembers being inspired by as a design student at the royal College of art, london, more than 25 years ago. it is a Honda concept sketch, showing three futuristic race bikes lined up on a grid, below a circuit grandstand graphic displaying the then far-off date to be 2020. the bikes are swoopy and fully enclosed, with balloon tyres, forkless front ends, and hydraulic front-wheel drive. Morton’s point is that 2020 is now in the past, yet those concept bikes seem as futuristic as ever.
‘what were the ingredients to create a motorcycle in 1995, when i began my career?’ he says. ‘an internal combustion engine, trellis frame, front forks, single-sided swing-arm, and some crude electronics. all right, so now we’re 25 years on from there. and the recipe for an MV agusta is a trellis frame, forks at the front, single-sided swing-arm, some slightly more advanced electronics, and a combustion engine. so, what the hell has happened in 25 years?’
By contrast, Morton himself has come a long way since he was a student in london, having ridden his Honda Benly 200 from his home in norwich in eastern england. now aged 50, he has lived in italy for half his life, during which time his work at Cagiva, Benelli, and MV has established him as one of the world’s best known and most influential motorcycle designers.
and now he is striking out again, having left MV after 18 years to form a design agency, C-Creative, with a small group of leading industry figures, including former boss Giovanni Castiglioni. For Morton, it is an opportunity to explore new areas of work — early projects include clothing and yacht design — as well as to apply fresh thinking to motorcycle design in a coming era that he thinks will offer unprecedented opportunity.
Morton has long had a passion for pushing design boundaries. we first met in 1995, when he was about to finish the rCa’s prestigious course in transport design, having just won the final year project competition with a full-sized motorcycle, inspired by a suit of armour and accompanied by a life-sized rider in matching gear. He was already determined to forge a career in motorcycle design. as a schoolboy a few years earlier, however, it had been meeting a leading car designer — Peter stevens, then of local firm lotus and the famed creator of the Mclaren F1 — that had set him on the path.
‘it was a destiny thing. i picked up a newspaper and there was a little article saying there was going to be a presentation by Peter stevens, a designer at lotus. so, i rode down to the city centre, sat in front of this chap and thought, “what a cool job!”. i didn’t know what i was going to do at the university, but i was good at art and technology and i loved motorbikes, so i thought it’d be really interesting to do something related to transportation design.’
His subsequent degree course in that subject at the Coventry university, in england’s motorcycling heartland of the Midlands, included a placement at ogle design, best known for shaping triumph’s t150 trident in the 1960s. that was followed by a post-graduate course at the rCa with a placement at seymour Powell, designers of the norton F1 rotary sports bike. Morton’s spectacular rCa final project, named “equus” after a mythical warhorse, brought him to the attention of former graduate Pierre terblanche of Cagiva and david robb, BMw’s chief designer.
‘the day before i presented it, i was lying on the floor trying to dress this oversized mannequin, completely filthy, with these two of the most respected bike designers offering me a job. BMw offered me a great package financially and it would have been an amazing opportunity to work for them. But Pierre had just done the ducati supermono and he was saying you can work with Massimo tamburini. i made a decision based on passion rather than logic.’
For the bike-mad student, who had grown up thrashing a red suzuki aP50 on his local roads, the opportunity to join legendary Bimota co-founder and ducati 916 creator tamburini at the Cagiva research Centre in san Marino was too good to turn down. a quarter of a century later, Morton is a famed designer himself and still in the area, now with partner and eight-year-old son. But living and working in italy has not always been easy.
that began with his arrival at CrC. ‘the conditions were difficult in italy and i wasn’t earning much but i was really lucky. i came out of the royal College and worked on the first MV — i worked on the swing-arm of the F4.’ and when MV followed the original 750-cc sport bike with a naked variant, Morton was heavily involved right from the beginning. ‘i did the initial concept of the Brutale 750. even the name Brutale was something on my sketches. tamburini finished it beautifully but all the key ingredients that made it the Brutale were there from the beginning, in my sketches, and i did the 3d models in clay.’
working for the maestro presented some unexpected challenges. ‘the reason i wanted to work for Massimo tamburini was that he was doing the most amazing looking motorbikes. unfortunately, it didn’t pan out as i anticipated. He had a really amazing eye for detail and proportions, but he wasn’t a traditional designer who started with a sketch and then did a [clay] model or whatever.
‘His approach was more haphazard, so i think he had difficulty in getting it over. He never really said, “when you’re doing this, you should consider this and this”. Basically, he would just do it and you kind of looked at it and thought, “why did he do it?” i’d though he would be like a mentor, but it ended up being quite conflictual towards the end.’
that came when Morton took an opportunity offered by Benelli, based just down the coast at Pesaro, where young boss andrea Merloni was planning to relaunch the firm as a superbike manufacturer. Hired as chief designer, Morton had to readjust his expectations. ‘i’d just been at the world’s most incredible design studio and i went to Benelli and there was nothing. no designers; just me. and after doing the Brutale, my first job was a bally seat for the Pepe 50-cc scooter!’
However, Morton knew that a superbike, based on a 900-cc triple engine, was coming soon and when it did, he was given free rein with its design. ‘Because italy is so screwed up, nobody told me what to do and nobody was there to manage it, so i just did what i thought was right, which was cool.’ upon the tornado 900’s launch in 1999, its elegant and distinctive lines, incorporating twin cooling fans in the tailpiece for the under-seat radiator, put both Benelli and its youthful designer on the map.
the tornado was followed in 2004 by the naked tnt derivative, which also made a big impact. ‘the tnt was quite radical really, maybe too much in some respects. But it still looks distinct even today.’ it was also influential, with several features that were soon being used elsewhere. ‘the stacked headlights were off my College project and ended up being quite a fashion thing, on the ducati 999 and some KtMs. the lateral fairings, nobody really did that. we did titanium colourways and the year after Kawasaki did the same on their er-5. and the aluminium rear subframe that was a sculptural and structural element is something that you see on many bikes now.’
not that Morton minds: ‘it’s quite nice as a designer to have elements that are stolen.’ and he appreciated being part of a small firm of barely more than 50 employees. ‘i enjoyed my time there so much. when we did the tornado launch at Circuit Paul ricard, i was involved in the presentation and everything; it was so dynamic and i was given so much freedom.’ But when that situation changed, after Benelli was bought by Chinese giant Qianjiang in 2005, Morton took an opportunity to re-join MV.
‘i ended up talking to tamburini and he said, “one day, i have to go into retirement and i need somebody who can take over the CrC”. But it ended up being a bit of a problem because by this time, Harley-davidson had taken over MV and tamburini had his list of criteria that didn’t necessarily align with what they wanted.’
Perhaps, it was inevitable that the duo should clash over the first major update of tamburini’s iconic F4. ‘the restyling was
Design is an expensive business these days. You can’t just go into a garage and start hacking away at a piece of foam or clay. These days a lot of clients expect a project to be done in record time’
partially done by tamburini, but he didn’t really want to change anything and i was trying to push to do something different,’ Morton recalls. it was a difficult period that went on for about a year, until tamburini said, “enough is enough. i want to get out of the company.” so, basically, i was left with the F4 to finish and it had to be done in record time.’ despite that friction, the resultant, 2010-model F4 was widely praised for its subtly sharpened lines and more rider-friendly character.
Morton’s next major MV project was his own and he rates the F3 675 sportster with which the firm began its three-cylinder family as probably his best work. ‘that was the first project where i had to say, “this is what i think MV agusta should be today,” which is, first of all, respect what’s been done in the past, right? try to add a little bit of something new, without going over the top with anything. Because the worst thing you could do is try to say, “i’m the best. i’m going to change the world.”
‘in my mind, an italian bike should be sexy and the F3 had to look as if tamburini had designed it. that’s what it came down to. i didn’t want it to scream “adrian Morton design”. the tornado was quite radical, in a way, and so is the tnt — almost like a student project, in terms of the naivety of it. whereas in MV, i’d accumulated a little bit more maturity, enough to say that, maybe, doing a bit less was actually better for us as a company.’
MV boss Claudio Castiglioni also played an important part, Morton recalls. ‘i did some sketches that were a lot more adventurous; the front fairing was much more pushing forward. But he kind of stopped me a little bit. i could have rebelled but actually decided that even less was better, to the point that it was almost like i wasn’t designing enough. But i think the F3 still looks completely and utterly balanced from every angle and the proportions are nice and it’s very italian. so, in retrospect, that was the right thing to do. in another 10 years, it will still look balanced and it won’t look old.’
Morton has spent much of the last decade maintaining his and MV’s high standards with a succession of striking and intricately designed models, notably the aggressive naked
dragster, the turismo Veloce with its improbably racy look for a sports-tourer, and the neo-retro superveloce 800. and then suddenly, last June, he left MV, partly for reasons on which he declines to elaborate and partly because after 18 years, he simply wants a fresh challenge before it is too late.
‘i absolutely loved working for MV agusta, right to the last day. But i felt that if i didn’t do something else, i’d just peter out being an MV designer for the next 15 years and i want to do something else. i think everybody has that aspiration but a lot of people don’t do it because there’s a risk involved in changing things at a certain point in your life. But i still love designing and i wanted a new stimulus. and another thing i love about this opportunity with C-Creative is that i can create a really good team of designers.’
the new venture is a substantial operation, backed by a Japanese investment group, and has already taken over noted italian design house Q-id. the size and backing, says Morton, is essential for what he, Castiglioni, and fellow co-founder, Paolo Bianchi, are trying to achieve. ‘the intention wasn’t to become a one-man-band operation; it was to form a group of really strong players and become an international design agency.
‘design is an expensive business these days. you can’t just go into a garage and start hacking away at a piece of foam or clay. these days a lot of clients expect a project to be done in record time and that involves having a lot of resource in virtual modelling, so you have the cost of software and virtual reality equipment. and Q-id have a really good portfolio of clients already and really good experience.
‘the motorcycle industry is quite small, relatively speaking, but within it there are a lot of players. not just in europe but the expanding markets in asia, africa… all those make an interesting palette of potential clients. and much as i love motorcycles, i’d love the opportunity to work on other projects. we’ve already been approached by a company to do some clothing, for example.’
Motorcycling’s inevitable move towards electric-powered machines also brings huge opportunities, Morton believes.
‘what an exciting time to be involved in design — this transitional period in motorcycle design or urban mobility, as it should be called now. i think there’s going to be a huge shift pretty soon, because it’s happened in the car industry.
‘look how the perception of mountain bikes has changed with electric mountain bikes. so many people have got an electric mountain bike or scooter or hoverboard; something that isn’t a motorbike. and the transition to devise a two-wheeled object that has some of that content is interesting. i think it’s an opportunity to reinvent what a motorcycle is.’
that could be models for mass production or exotic bikes along hypercar lines. ‘we want to do something one day that can be compared to the Koenigsegg of motorcycles — mega exclusive, hand-made, and without normal limitations. Motorcycling is not like the car market in terms of people spending millions, but there is space to do something bonkers, where there won’t be any filters on design.’
it is now that Morton reaches for his phone to find that old Honda designer’s sketch of a futuristic, 2020 race grid that had inspired him as a student more than 25 years ago. His route from norwich to C-Creative has involved some thrilling twists, like the road from rimini to san Marino that runs right past his new office. if anyone is in pole position to shape motorcycling’s future from here on, it is arguably adrian Morton.