COLLECTOR: MORBIDELLI
What more fitting way to pay tribute to the recently departed engineering legend than a visit to the museum that the Renaissance man of Italian motorcycling created with his personal passion?
We take a tour of his museum before his untimely demise
We were privileged to be shown around Giancarlo Morbidelli’s museum before he sadly passed away on February 10, aged 86, after a long illness. The legendary builder of title-winning Grand Prix road racers bearing his name, Giancarlo created the museum personally, and was responsible for its existence almost single-handedly.
The sheer scale of the museum, which housed what was believed to be the largest private collection of motorcycles in Italy, reflects the level of success and financial rewards that Morbidelli had achieved later in his lifetime – but his beginnings were much more humble. He was born in 1934 into a poor family living off the soil in the Marche region of Italy, and began work at the age of 16 as an apprentice fitter in a factory repairing woodworking machinery, in what became his home town of Pesaro, on Italy’s Adriatic Coast. The other particular engineering speciality of the place was motorcycles – it’s the home town of Benelli.
During his lifetime, as his rags-to-riches saga unfolded, he created a succession of world title-winning motorcycles and innovative road bikes, along the way helping to power Italy’s post-world War II resurgence from derelict battleground to thriving economy in the 1960s to ’70s. The Museo Morbidelli ended up housing many of the machines he created, along with examples of exceptional motorcycles built by other manufacturers.
Giancarlo pursued his passion for motorcycle sport from a very young age, even after starting his own machine tool company in the late ’50s. Using his technical skills, after hours, to tune Benelli and Motobi bikes to a succession of race victories came as a relief from the punishing days spent building Morbidelli Woodworking Machines into the global industry leader it had become by the 1980s.
His firm eventually employed over 300 people and
eventually manufactured increasingly high-tech CNC machine tools for worldwide export to over 60 countries. In 1997, Morbidelli sold the company, leaving him with the previous inner-city factory site, which he then converted into a motorcycle museum that opened to the public in 1999. It displayed over 350 bikes dating from 1904, including a complete array of Morbidelli GP racers.
Giancarlo’s ambition was always to go racing with a bike bearing his own name – and the results when he did so were spectacular. He constructed his first two-stroke race bike in 1967 – using the crankcase and gearbox of a 50cc Benelli, but with his own cylinder. That led to his designing and constructing the first complete Morbidelli 50cc GP racer in 1969. This, and all the other sky-blueand-white rotary-valve racers carrying the Morbidelli name, were entirely constructed in a corner of their creator’s Pesaro woodworking machinery factory, even down to the wooden patterns used to make the engine castings.
As an accomplished self-taught engineer, Giancarlo did much of the design work himself when time permitted, while hiring freelance designers such as Franco Ringhini, then Jörg Müller to take overall charge of the projects. The relatively modest nature of his homespun team was revealed when the boss of Kawasaki’s race team visited the Morbidelli pit to congratulate him, after Mario Lega had defeated the Green Meanies to win the 1977 World 250GP title on the Pesaro-built bike. “And how many engineering staff do you have in your race department, Mr Morbidelli?” asked the Japanese executive politely. “Well, normally there’s three of us – unless I’m there, when it’s four,” he replied.
At various times between 1969 and 1982, the rotaryvalve Morbidelli two-strokes contested every single GP class from 50cc to 500cc, and Giancarlo’s bikes went on to win six rider’s world titles under the Morbidelli or MBA (Morbidelli Benelli Armi) banners. Morbidelli works riders were almost all local recruits, including Graziano Rossi – a long-haired, exuberant Pesaro primary school teacher
‘GIANCARLO’S AMBITION WAS ALWAYS TO GO RACING WITH A BIKE BEARING HIS NAME’
who won three GPS for Morbidelli to finish third in the 1979 250cc World Championship – although, of course, nowadays he’s better known as Valentino’s dad!
A brave attempt to challenge the Japanese in the 500GP class saw the 1979 debut in Rossi’s hands of the rotaryvalve square-four Morbidelli, but it suffered many mechanical breakdowns. This was replaced for 1981 by one of the most sophisticated GP racers yet built, with a cast aluminium monocoque chassis and a revised narrow-angle (15°) V4 engine, which was more powerful but equally unreliable. Designed and built in-house at Pesaro, its best result came in its final race at the Imola round of the 1982 Italian 500cc Championship, when Giovanni Pelletier finished ninth against an array of Japanese production racers.
At the end of ’82, Morbidelli quit GPS – not because he’d fallen out of love with motorcycles, but because his son Gianni, born in 1968, had begun to carve out a race career for himself on four wheels, not two. Typically, his dad threw all his efforts into helping him reach the top, including building a Morbidelli 125cc single-cylinder reed-valve engine which took Gianni to the 1986 Italian national kart title, as well as the world runner-up slot in the Caesars Palace car park in Las Vegas.
As Gianni’s racing career developed, he was loaned to Ferrari’s Formula One team to replace the recently-fired Alain Prost. This wasn’t the first time a Ferrari-morbidelli connection had been established – it had also happened two decades earlier. When I asked why Morbidelli engine crankcases all featured a Cavallino Rampante Prancing Horse emblem cast into them, Giancarlo told me: “Enzo Ferrari and I had become friends. He was very passionate about bike racing, because in the early 1930s Scuderia Ferrari competed with British-made Rudge machines in motorcycle as well as car races.
“Enzo believed motorcycle racing was an excellent training ground – three of his Scuderia’s most successful drivers – Tazio Nuvolari, Achille Varzi and Piero Taruffi – raced
‘FERRARI OFFERED TO CAST MORBIDELLI CRANKCASES IN HIS FOUNDRY AT MARANELLO’
bikes before turning to cars. He offered to cast our crankcases in his foundry at Maranello, where they used only the latest production methods and the best materials. It was an honour for me, as well as a pleasure for him, that we were so successful with engines he had a hand in creating, which naturally carried Il Cavallino on them!”
With son Gianni’s racing career launched, Papa Morbidelli returned to putting into metal the multitude of ideas bristling with original thought for two wheels and four flowing from his fertile mind. Like the 22cc reed-valve two-stroke clip-on engine Giancarlo built to power the pushbike he used to zip around his Pesaro factory. Thousands were later built in India under the Mosquito label, after he sold the design to a firm there.
Then there was the 30cc rotary-valve four-stroke motor with Cross-type valve gear, which Giancarlo created for use in an ultra-economical moped. Other innovations included the paddle-shift gearbox he designed in 1991 for the Minardi F1 team while son Gianni was racing for them.
He also had a large hand in helping British enthusiast George Beale construct replica four-cylinder Benelli 350/500cc GP racers – on the basis that faithful external copies should be built and raced so that modern audiences could experience the thrill of seeing and hearing such bikes in action, thereby allowing the worn-out originals to be retired to museum display. In collaboration with Beale, he also developed ultra-short-stroke Matchless G50 engines for use in classic racing.
Morbidelli also spent his time tracking down an endless succession of historic motorcycles for his museum, often restoring them personally with the help of the two engineers who had previously constructed his title-winning GP racers and whom he continued to employ. And then (just because
he got bored on holiday, you understand) in 1994 Morbidelli designed an 850cc V8 motorcycle and put it into production – the machine bore the emblem of a leaping jaguar, such was Giancarlo’s passion for the British car marque!
The liquid-cooled, four-cam, 32-valve, 847cc Morbidelli V8 was intended to be the ultimate sports touring bike, but suffered a false start due to car designer Pininfarina’s controversial prototype styling. When the project was given to nearby Bimota, they delivered a refined, classy-looking motorcycle with handling to match its engine design. Sadly, only a prototype and three production bikes were ever built before the project came to a halt in 1998, after Morbidelli sold his machine tool business – which included the rights to the Morbidelli V8 engine, and all its tooling. I personally was permitted to ride the 850 V8 – and can attest to what a missed opportunity that was. His passion for extreme engineering undeterred, Morbidelli had even started building the makings of a 750cc V12 two-wheeler before he was so sadly stricken down by illness, with the project still incomplete.
With no company to worry about, Giancarlo’s continuing passion for motorcycles led him to open the Museo Morbidelli in his former factory in Via Fermo, Pesaro, adapting the old buildings to house his continually growing collection of historic motorcycles, with the old Reparto Corse race HQ becoming a restoration workshop. In 1999 he opened the doors to the public, with the 350-strong collection being displayed in an area of 3000 square metres and representing bikes from all over the world, including several prototypes and other one-off creations.
It is poignant, then, that such an effervescent, creative
and modest person should have been struck down by Alzheimer’s in the sunset of a productive life, necessitating the closure of the Museo Morbidelli and the liquidation of the collection. Financial considerations led to the facility being closed to the public over a year ago, with the Morbidelli family – especially son Gianni and daughter Letizia – feeling they had no option but to dispose of the contents.
They selected Uk-based Bonhams to conduct the sale, which will take place over two separate dates. That’s because export licences are required for the 70-plus pre1945 motorcycles in the collection, whereas this is not the case with post-war machinery. Anything made over 75 years ago must have an export licence to be moved outside the country, even to another EU nation.
The furore which greeted the news of their departure from Italy has raged more or less unchecked ever since. Gianni, in particular, has suffered untold criticism verging on paranoia, with some self-appointed guardians of Italy’s cultural heritage expressing their displeasure at such a large collection of motorcycles being exported abroad – even though he has been scrupulous in following every legal requirement in consigning the Museo Morbidelli bikes to the auction house for sale in the UK.
In July last year, the post-war motorcycles were delivered to Bonhams’ top-secret warehouse somewhere in the UK. They’ve been kept there ever since, in air-conditioned security alongside Old Master paintings and expensive antique furniture and jewellery, while awaiting their sale at the Stafford Classic Bike Show (see below).