More than the sum of its parts

Sometimes a specification sheet can give the totally wrong impression of a bike. The MV Agusta 350S might just be the best example of such a phenomenon...

The early 1970s was a difficult time for MV Agusta. Not least because in January 1971, while accompanying the President of Finland, Urho Kekkonen, on a visit to the factory, company founder Count Domenico Agusta suffered a heart attack. He passed away four days later.

The count’s untimely death hit the firm hard. Domenico had – quite rightly – realised that not every Italian could afford to (or want to) buy exclusive, expensive, multi-cylinder exotica and had persevered with cheaper, smaller capacity singles and twins throughout the 1960s so MV had the twin cylinder 350B platform.

The trouble was – or one of the troubles, at least – was that around the time the covers were coming off the new MV 350S, the popularity of smaller capacity machines was waning; Honda's CB750 had initiated the race for big engines, more cylinders and speed.

The second problem was that despite looking like one, the 350S shared little DNA with its racing relatives and was built on what was seen at the time as an outdated platform.

But period reviewers were perhaps missing the mark. True, they would have been looking at it as a new bike proposition as opposed to a weekend plaything as I am, but they perhaps judged the little MV a bit too harshly.

Sure, it may have lacked technical advances and scolding performance its racing pedigree suggested, but sometimes none of that really matters.

As the old mantra goes: sometimes a bike is more than the sum of its parts. I think with the MV 350S, that definitely rings true.