Adrian Morton..........
MV Agusta’s Senior Designer is a Brit, with an impressive record...
MV’s shapes and colours man.
I was quite good at art at school and thought what can I do with these skills?
To cut a long story short I went to college in Norwich where there was Peter Stevens, the designer of the old McLaren F1 and one of the Lotus F1s. He was saying that this is what he was doing for a job, and I thought that would be great. I hadn’t thought about the fact that all bikes are designed by someone. When you’re 16 you just see cars and bikes on the road and you don’t think about what goes in to them to be designed and built.
I did four years at Coventry University with a specialisation in transportation design.
It was an excellent platform. I then had the good fortune to go to the Royal College of Art where I did a masters degree in vehicle design. That was an incredible launch pad, because there were about 11 people that got selected to go to the RCA – and it was all based on your potential as a designer. I did a full size motorcycle and the leathers that were all linked visually – I put all my eggs in one basket because I wanted to get into the bike industry because I love motorcycles.
As I was putting the bike on the stand I had Dave Robb from BMW and Pierre Terblanche from Ducati offering me a job.
I went to a BMW dealer and couldn’t picture myself designing them at the time, and then you couldn’t get better than the 916, so I went to Ducati. I couldn’t turn that down.
So it was off to Italy in 1995.
Not to Bologna, but to San Marino to the Cagiva Research Centre where Tamburini was running it and Terblanche was there too. I did some parts of the F4, the swingarm, and the Brutale where I did the original concept with all the key elements.
Then went to Benelli.
I was the only designer and I had the freedom to do what the hell I wanted, it was like being back at college again. It was awesome. I was doing everything, from seats for scooters, then working on the new three cylinder platform – so the Tornado. I didn’t even move house, I was only 20km away from the factory and I really liked living in Italy.
I sti ll look at the F4 and the brut ale as the ben chm ark for desi gn...
The Tornado was designed in three and a half months.
It was done in a company in England called APA, which doesn’t exist anymore. The only thing that existed from Benelli were the tubes on the frame, everything else was designed from scratch. The concept was very risky in terms of design language, and the production bike lost a lot from the original. It got lost as a project as it was industrialised. That’s not the reality of design, that’s the reality of Benelli, unfortunately. There were a lot of things on that bike that weren’t as I wanted it. I was pushing for a deltabox to drag the air over the radiator, but no-one wanted it. I left Benelli when the Chinese bought the company, so about eight years ago, and went back to CRC with Tamburini. He said to me that he needed someone after he retired, but in reality it worked out differently.
I have to have a sensibility to engineering.
I can’t do structural analysis, but I know what looks right. So the swingarm on the F3 and the Rivale is just styling, but it’s styling with some engineering thought behind it. It’s not there 100 per cent for the aesthetics, it has to work. The swingarm on the F4 as well, that was a sculpture, it wasn’t about making the strongest or most rigid component. It works inside out, so you hand it over to the technical office to make it work. It’s a balance between functionality and it having to look incredible – and that’s even more the case with working for MV because there were benchmarks set that were really high. Benelli for me was like Lamborghini, but MV is more like Ferrari, and you do things in different ways.
The world is a different place since the F4 was originally designed.
But I still look at the F4 and Brutale as the benchmark. I give everything my best shot, when you have that brand on the tank you have to make it the best you can. It has to be special. We don’t have the same philosophy as other brands, who might go through all the costings in minute details. We have to accept some parts are more complicated to make them more distinctive. Designers shouldn’t really do that, but we have to here. Sometimes I get away with murder!
The F3 is a platform for the range.
Not just the F3. All the frames are the same, but with slight changes to suit. So for an F3 you need attachment points for a fairing, but you don’t with the B3 or Rivale. And there are different head angles, things like that. It was modular up to a point. The main key items remain the same, and even for the changed head angle, you just jig slightly differently. I started on the F3 after the modular parts were designed. It was a great project to work on – and it costs a lot less than the F4.
Harley was very tight on the F3’s development costs when it owned MV.
For the first time ever we had to look closely at costs. The F3 had to have everything that everyone wants on an MV, and I think it is an MV. When you put it next to the old F4, the F3 retains the things that makes it an MV.
Honda has to sell millions of bikes.
Their system depends on it. We don’t have to do that, and don’t want to do that. We’re never going to be mass market. We’re niche, but we’d like that to be a big niche.
I always ask this of the test riders.
When they park up do people come over and have a look? So long as they do, that’s what an MV should be. It has to stand out.