BENELLI TORNADO 650
A fine Italian parallel twin that was obsolete before it could be built
Benelli’s revival under Chinese ownership has seen annual sales of Italy’s oldest motorcycle marque smash the 50,000-bike barrier for the first time since the 1960s, with a record 63,200 motorcycles delivered worldwide in 2019. And in launching its new 2020 model 752 S paralleltwin the historic brand has commemorated the 50th birthday of the model which first established Benelli as a global bigbike player – the Tornado 650 S, which was launched at the 1967 Milan Show but only began production late in 1970.
Likewise a parallel-twin, but an air-cooled ohv four-valve model rather than a liquid-cooled dohc eight-valver like today’s 752 S, the 3000 examples of the Tornado built from 1970-74 represented the Italian idea of what a traditional British parallel twin should have been.
Benelli was founded in 1911 as a family-run bike and car repair business in Pesaro on Italy’s Adriatic Coast. By 1966 its 550 workers were building more than 300 small-capacity bikes a day, with many heading across the Atlantic to US importer Cosmopolitan Motors in Pennsylvania. Cosmo’s owners, the Wise family, sold many of these via mail order through the Montgomery Ward national store chain, but rebranded with the Riverside label.
In 1967, though, Piaggo launched the Ciao, its awardwinning 50cc moped of which more than three million were sold during the next 40 years, undercutting comparable models from Benelli and other firms on price and availability.
The Benelli family had good warning of the Ciao’s arrival, which made it all the more vital for them to start producing the larger capacity models the Wises had repeatedly been asking for. Up until then, nothing larger than 250cc had ever been built post-war by Benelli.
“We and our dealers had many customers who’d learned to ride on our small Benelli models, but now wanted something bigger – and we had nothing to offer them,” Larry Wise, the eldest brother, told me on one of my visits to Cosmo’s HQ in Hatboro, Pennsylvania in the 1980s. “Something Italian to compete with the Honda CB77 Super Hawk was what we needed – that and a 650 twin to go against the British, especially BSA and Triumph. But it was only when the Ciao was coming that they started listening to us.”
Benelli originally decided to produce an anti-cb77 350cc parallel-twin and recruited progettista Piero Prampolini to design the engine. He had worked for Parilla and Mondial in Milan, then joined Motobi in 1955 to produce several successful designs, especially its first four-stroke models, the horizontal-cylinder ohv 125/175cc Catria. Prampolini (whose later credits included the 350/500GP four-cylinder Benellis on which Jarno Saarinen twice defeated Agostini and MV Agusta on their 1972 debut in the Pesaro street race before joining the Yamaha factory team) had left Motobi in 1965 to work on designing three-wheel delivery trucks for OMER in his home town of Reggio Emilia.
Benelli persuaded him to draw up the 350 twin in his spare time – but after just a month of work Benelli scrapped this in favour of a 500cc inline four. Six weeks later this, too, was cancelled. Finally, in December 1966, he was asked to design a 650cc parallel twin, after Benelli saw the prototype Laverda 650 at London’s November 1966 Earls Court Show.
The Benelli Tornado 650 duly appeared at the November 1967 Milan Show, although the show bike’s engine was still only a wooden mock-up. It was targeted at British overheadvalve twins like the Norton Commando, Triumph Bonneville and BSA Lightning, rather than the single-overhead-cam Laverda so clearly inspired by the Honda CB77.
The wet-sump, all-aluminium Benelli motor featured a horizontally-split crankcase to ensure oil-tightness, and a unit-construction five-speed gearbox with an oil-bath clutch and helical gear primary drive, rather than a chain. Bosch coil ignition was fitted, with a 12v battery and 150W alternator belt-driven off the left end of the crank. The lightly-finned cylinders, with cast iron liners, were slanted forward slightly by 12°. The four-bearing Brit-style 360° steel crankshaft carried forged conrods with needle roller bearings at both ends, and cast three-ring pistons delivered radically oversquare engine dimensions for the day of 84mm x 58mm, giving a capacity of 643cc. The Laverda’s 644cc engine measured 75mm x 74mm, while the 649cc Triumph Bonneville T120R was a long-stroke 71mm x 82mm format.
The Tornado’s two valves per cylinder (38mm inlet/35mm exhaust) were set at a thoroughly modern included angle of 58°, with bronze valve seats and guides, and were operated via tappets and rocker arms actuated by short, offset steel
pushrods driven by a single cam positioned low down in front of the crankshaft, like on a Norton Commando, and driven directly off its right end.
Twin 29mm concentric Dell’orto VHB carbs with curious square slides were fitted, and to begin with there was only a right-side kickstart, though a Bosch electric starter was a later option. Running 9:1 compression, the engine delivered a claimed 50bhp at 7400rpm at the rear wheel, with peak torque of 39.75ft lb at 4000rpm.
This very clean-looking motor, with all-internal oilways to avoid messy-looking external hoses, had an oil-level sight glass on the right-hand side of the engine, with a substantial single-stage oil pump centrally mounted low down in front of the camshaft, from which it was driven directly to draw oil from the crankcase via a mesh strainer and a cartridge oil filter. This system ensured that the crank, camshaft, pushrods, tappets and rocker arms were all pressure lubricated.
Prampolini’s compact engine was housed in a twin-loop cradle frame designed by Luigi Benelli, with a single substantial top tube bifurcating into a subframe for the 810mm-high dual seat. The forks were 35mm Marzocchis, with either Ceriani or Marzocchi dual shocks were fitted (both threeway adjustable for spring preload), with the tubular steel swingarm delivering a compact 1380mm wheelbase. Dry weight was 190kg, with a meaty-looking 230mm Grimeca four-leading-shoe front drum to haul that down from a claimed top speed of 111mph, with a corresponding 200mm Grimeca single-leading-shoe rear.
The Tornado attracted heaps of favourable comment on its public debut in November 1967 and factory testers Renzo Pasolini, future world champion Eugenio Lazzarini and long-time Benelli stalwart Cristofero Fattori clocked up the miles. They reported few problems – apart from substantial vibration above 4000rpm, then considered a fact of life when going fast on a twin-cylinder sports bike. Movie star Steve Mcqueen was hired by the Wises as a celebrity marque ambassador – although before committing to this, he insisted on riding the bike first. After completing Bullitt in San Francisco, Mcqueen flew to Pesaro to ride the prototype Tornado in company with Pasolini, with the two egging each other on to perform ever riskier tricks before Luigi Benelli called a halt to their antics. Too bad footage of that never appeared in On Any Sunday!
Steve liked the Tornado but, avid fan as he was of the
Rickman brothers’ Métisse frames, wanted a narrower, tighter-looking chassis with a more compact fuel tank. This was duly produced by Benelli (see photo on previous page), but the whole Benelli/mcqueen tie-up died a death.
The reason for that wasn’t hard to decipher – Benelli were unable to put it into production for lack of the necessary machine tools to do so! Exactly who was responsible for this oversight is shrouded in the mists of time, but it might well have been that finances were so tight that the money simply wasn’t there when the cheques needed to be signed.
The Tornado was ready for production by mid-1968, but it took until late in 1970 before the first batch of bikes were air-freighted to the USA in an effort to keep the Wise family and their dealers happy. It was all too late – the pushrod ohv 650 twin’s ship had sailed, and the Benelli family’s hopes of keeping control of their business went with it.
In the meantime, Laverda had upsized its sohc engine to 750cc for 1968. Moto Guzzi had launched the 700cc V7 one year earlier. Bsa/triumph still used pushrods, but had added another cylinder to its parallel twins to produce the 750cc Rocket 3 and Trident in 1968. The sohc Ducati 750 GT V-twin appeared in 1970. And, worst of all, Honda launched the CB750 inline four in 1969, and the rules of the game were changed for ever.
Late in 1972, having finally got the Tornado into series production, Benelli was sold to Italo-argentinian entrepreneur Alejandro De Tomaso, whose plans didn’t involve a neovintage pushrod-engined model.
The Tornado sold 613 bikes in Italy in its 1971 debut year – against a total of 1915 Laverda 750 twins (and 1929 Honda CB750 fours). For 1972 Prampolini produced an improved version, the Tornado 650 S, with a Bosch electric start as standard, its steel-rimmed 18in wire wheels replaced by Borrani aluminium rims, compression raised to 9.6:1, altered gear ratios, a rebalanced crank to reduce vibration, revised ignition timing and a new Lafranconi exhaust. The result was a slight increase in outright performance, with 52bhp now available at the wheel but at 200rpm less, and a much broader and more fluid power delivery, plus an even better spread of torque than before.
Sales almost doubled in Italy, with 1008 Tornado S-versions sold in 1972 (against 3082 Laverdas, and 3033 Honda fours), and Cosmo had likewise begun to ramp up US sales, too. But on his arrival in Pesaro early in 1973, de Tomaso established a strategic plan to revitalise Benelli – and that didn’t include the 650 twin.
While Prampolini carried out instructions to acquire a CB500 Honda four and copy it down to the last mechanical detail to create the Benelli 500 Quattro, and add two extra cylinders to make the 750 Sei for 1974, De Tomaso sanctioned the creation of the Tornado 650 S2 for sale in ’73.
It got a fresher, more sporty appearance, lower-mounted bars, a new hump-backed seat, and a plexiglass screen wrapped around the top of the headlight. Prampolini rebalanced the crank again to remove a few more vibes, but the greatest help was the provision of thick footrest
rubbers, as well as rubber-mounting for the handlebars.
As a British fan of Italian bikes, I bought one of these 1973 S2s back in 1985. In the 30 years of ownership before I finally sold it to a friend on moving house in 2015, it became part of the family. While I can’t say I clocked up a huge mileage on it, it was always there for a spirited Sunday morning ride around the Warwickshire lanes and Cotswold hills, or a summer evening blast out to a riverside pub.
They say you don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it – and it wasn’t until last autumn, when I spent an enjoyable 120-mile day riding round Eastern Pennsylvania with Retro Tours (retrotours.com) owner Joel Samick on the 1972 Benelli 650 S in his rental fleet, that I realised how much I missed my Tornado.
Hopping aboard revealed a different riding position on this earlier Us-model than ‘my’ year-later S2, with a more upright, relatively close-coupled stance thanks to the taller, pulled-back handlebars compared to the sportier, flatter one on the Euro-spec S2. I thumbed the massive button to get the Bosch starter whirring and the motor to burst into life through the musically-resonant Lafranconi exhausts, settling to a lilting 1500rpm idle most unlike a two-up parallel-twin’s usual dull thud.
The earliest Tornados apparently vibrated much more than the S-versions, and I never found the S2 or Joel’s S-model to tingle anything like as much as a Norton Atlas or even a Bonneville. That’s presumably thanks to the copious rubber mounts and weighted handlebar ends. Only if you rev it anywhere close to the 7200rpm redline does it start to vibe unduly – but although the short-stroke motor encourages you to do that, shifting up at 5500 will see the motor running sweet and smooth as you hit a higher gear right in the fat part of the torque curve.
‘AN EXCELLENT MOTORCYCLE THAT SHOWED THE BRITISH WHAT THEY SHOULD’VE EVOLVED THEIR OWN PARALLEL TWINS INTO’
The Tornado’s four light flywheels have the short-stroke motor picking up revs super-responsively, though the biggest surprise is the huge amount of torque on tap from such a short-stroke engine format – and not only in tight, twisty stretches. Despite the fairly hefty dry weight of 209kg, the bike feels well balanced and quite low-slung on its 18in wheels, thanks to the engine’s compact build, which allowed chassis designer Luigi Benelli to deliver a low centre of gravity compared to other such 650/750 parallel twins.
That light urban steering could have resulted in a downside of high-speed instability, but that’s absolutely not the case with the Tornado. Luigi Benelli had never designed a frame for a bike this heavy or powerful before, but you’d never guess that from the way it steers – and it’s super-precise at high speeds, despite the short wheelbase.
The only disappointment on my Retro Tours ride was the stiff action of the meaty-looking 240mm four-leading-shoe Grimeca front brake which, to make matters worse, didn’t provide much stopping power. I know from my old S2 that this is one of the best front drum brakes ever fitted to a series production motorcycle. OK, it’s heavier than a four-timesmore-costly 250mm Fontana – but in effectiveness it should be right up there.
Tornados are few and far between, but it was an excellent motorcycle that showed British manufacturers what they should have evolved their own parallel twins into. While the S2 remained available in Italy until 1975, production dwindled to just 300 bikes in 1974, before finally ending altogether, with just over 3000 examples built.
It was a classic example of a bike that was thoroughly up to date when conceived, but lessened in appeal and profitability for each of the three years it sat on the sidelines waiting for production to start. A pity, because it deserved better.