What if Ferrari built motorcycles? Could they possibly be as phantasmagorically beautiful as the cars that have worn the Prancing Horse? As technologically advanced? As stubbornly expensive? And would they be as universally admired, sought-after, and, most importantly, as intoxicatingly addictive to ride as a 458 or an SF90XX is to drive?
And what would have happened if Enzo had decided to race bikes instead of cars? Or even along with cars? Would Scuderia Ferrari have been as incredibly successful on two wheels as it has been on four? Would his eponymous motorcycle team own as many MotoGP titles as the Scuderia does F1 championships?
And finally, the real important question: could we, those of us who think four wheels are two too many — and believe Valentino Rossi a more beatific deity than Michael Schumacher — have really bought a motorcycle that genuinely wore the red of Maranello?
We will, of course, never know. But, if you want to know how tantalizing close we actually came, read on.
The blatantly fraudulent
Earlier this year, a freelance designer named Kar Lee wondered what would happen “if car manufacturers built superbikes”? His website, Kardesign Koncepts, even wondered aloud whether the Ferrari Furai 1197 featured on his page would have had a “V6 or V8 lurking under the fairing.” Consider my interest instantly raised.
Could I have missed some form of inside scoop, despite being on a first-name basis with most of Maranello’s public relations crew? Was Ferrari really cooking up a super two-wheeler? My God, thought I, my RRSP isn’t as full as I’d like it to be as I reach my sunset years, but if Ferrari is building a bike, I need to have one, even it means defunding my retirement.
Even more tantalizing was Lee’s intimation that such a beast would be powered by either a V6 or V8. The world’s only V6 motorcycle — to date — was an Italian Laverda, which, if I am remembering correctly, was designed by an engineer liberated from Maserati, one Giulio Alfieri. Hell, if lowly Laverda could liberate an engine designer from Modena, what’s stopping someone from Maranello designing a V6 — or even a 458-inspired V8 — that could fit into an aluminum-beam-frame two-wheeler?
But, alas, a quick scroll further down the page revealed I’d been duped by that most modern of fake news, artificial intelligence. In Lee’s own words, “using the power of Midjourney AI and some good old-fashioned Photoshop magic, I imagined what a superbike would look like from Ferrari, Ford, and Tesla.”
The only good thing about this subterfuge is that it definitely pointed to the limitations of AI, at least as it pertains to designing motorcycles. Oh, credit where credit is due, Lee’s Furai is achingly gorgeous, with just enough Ferrari influences to make the whole thing feel real. But a few images down, his imagined Tesla motorcycle — the “One” — managed to capture all the grotesqueness, if not quite the angularity, that is a Cybertruck, it wasn’t much of a motorcycle.
Ditto his two-wheeled homage to homage to Ford’s GT40, which looks, for all the world, like a Yamaha Virago doing it doggy-style with a particularly plump Buell 1125R. If you know your motorcycles, you’ll remember that both those bikes were considered amongst the ugliest of their breed. Their progeny, I can assure you, is even fuglier.
The motorcycle powered by a Ferrari V8
I always took the Danish as the most sensible and reserved of Scandinavians. You know, all their food needs to be organic, they all seem to wear black, and damned if I’ve ever seen one — at least without a snootful of akvavit — smile.
But at least one — Birger Hansen — obviously has a sense of humour. Oh, he and his buddy Michael Anderson had to get their Tuborg on to come up with the idea of stuffing the engine out of a Ferrari F355 into a Boss Hogg chassis, but nonetheless, there was some Danish to his madness.
For one thing, the whole, meticulously-built contraption took over ten years to build. For another, it was built with enough purpose that Hansen managed to get “type approval” and road registration from the Technischer Überwachungsverein (TUV), no mean feat in a country known, again, for being sensible and reserved.
The bike is, of course, painted Ferrari Red, and, while it may not be reserved, the choice of a Akropovic exhaust to show off that booming 3.5-litre V8 makes perfect sense to me.
The legitimate son
British bike builder Dave Kay did it the right way. Two years after Enzo died, he wrote Ferrari’s figlio to ask for permission to build a two-wheeled tribute to the late, great Modenese, and, for some strange reason — that no one has yet been able to decipher — Piero didn’t say “no.” In fact, according to Bonhams, who sold the bike in 2008, the note actually specifically gave Kay “the approval to place the Ferrari badge on your motorbike.” He even wished Kay good luck with his project.
The end result — finished in 1995 — is, well, kind of expected. Though Bonhams claimed the engine was “scratchbuilt,” the four-cylinder looks strikingly similar to MV Agusta’s transverse fours, hardly a wonder, since Kay is far better known as one of the premier restorers of classic MVs. Even the pipes look like replicas of the swoopy four-into-fours that Magni used to make for Count Agusta’s finest.
What is different are some de rigueur (for a car, not a bike) Weber carbs fuelling the whole shebang, presumably because, well, that’s what Ferrari used, never mind that no serious bike-builder ever went dual-throat. The frame, constructed of period-appropriate Reynolds 531 tubing, is also custom-made, but is, again, strikingly similar to the MVs Kay is accustomed to fettling.
And, as with Kar Lee’s Furai, the major reminisce of Maranello’s past is a series of Testarossa-inspired strakes in the bodywork. Thank God, then, that the letter from Piero Ferrari appears to be completely authentic, which makes the Kay Special, rebadged MV or no, the only modern motorcycle able to legitimately claim Prancing Horse badging.
The Ferrari of motorcycles
What makes Kay’s association with MV Agusta feel all the more like a real Ferrari collab is that eventually, with the former’s rebirth in 1998 (after the death of founder Count Domenico Agusta, the company went into a tailspin and eventually went bust in 1980) the brand did become known as “the Ferrari of motorcycles.” The moniker was made all the more legitimate by the fact Ferrari actually designed the cylinder head — with a novel radially-disposed-valves combustion chamber — that separated the then-iconic 749.4-cc F4 from the CBRs and Ninjas of the day.
Also making that signatory all the more legitimate is that during the same ’50s and ’60s that were Ferrari’s heyday, MV Agusta was unbeatable, winning, in the hands of motorcycling legends Giacomo Agostini, John Surtees, and Mike Hailwood, every GP500 title (the two-wheeled equivalent of Formula One) between 1958 and 1974, and 10 GP350 championships between ‘58 and ‘73.
And MV Agusta’s narrative parallels Ferrari’s in many ways. The founder of one was an actual count, the other thought he was royalty; both companies only reluctantly made production vehicles to sell to ordinary consumers; and, just like Ferrari, MV Agusta’s history is one of financial precipices.
Like Fiat’s rescue of Ferrari in 1998, a white knight has finally come to save MV Agusta. Earlier this year, Austrian motorcycling giant KTM signed a deal to take over management of MV and, just as Fiat did, it’s promised to keep MV’s rich racing heritage intact. New MV CEO Hubert Trunkenpolz is promising a return to MotoGP in 2027. If he keeps his word as faithfully as the Agnelli family did, the best of MV may be yet come.
The real Ferrari motorcycle—sort of
It turns out there really was a Ferrari-branded motorcycle. In fact, there was a whole lineup of them, in multiple displacements and different styles. Only it wasn’t that Ferrari.
It happened thanks to a tinkerer named Amos Ferrari, who worked at Moto Parilla (itself a fairly famous Italian motorcycle brand). Perhaps spurred on by the success of the real Ferrari — that would be Enzo — he left Parilla and incorporated Ferrari motorcycles in Milan in 1952, with his brother. In their short lifespan, they built 125-, 150-, 160-, and 175-cubic-centimetre motorcycles — in post-war Italy, they were considered full-sized — that were unsurprisingly similar to the Parillas he used to build, save for a novel rear suspension.
As legends go, after the 1952 Milan motorcycle show, the real Ferrari — again, Enzo — was bombarded with queries on where to purchase one of his new motorcycles. And, according to black & white garage, Amos was doing gangbuster business trading on Enzo’s good name. Hardly surprising, then, that Enzo took the brothers to court, where he won an injunction forcing the brothers to change the name of their company.
If Ferrari is building a bike, I need to have one, even it means defunding my retirement
The compromise was that all future motorcycles were branded Fratelli Ferrari (the Brothers Ferrari) and their sales success took a dramatic downturn. Nonetheless, you can still find early 125- and 150-cc models that were simply branded “Ferrari,” though they, of course, lacked any Prancing Horses. If you’re looking to buy a classic motorcycle that was genuinely — wink, wink — built by a, but not the, Ferrari, your best bet is to contact bwgarage.com. They’ve sold at least two in recent years.
And then this s#!t gets real
I had no idea — and I say this as both bike and Ferrari fanatic — that Enzo himself rode motorcycles. But dig deep enough and, indeed, in his callow — that should be read “poor” — youth, he reportedly owned two, a Belgian FN and an American Henderson, both ultra-rare four-cylinder luxury motorcycles, the latter supposedly purloined from the American armed forces as they abandoned their hardware on their departure from post-war Italy.
Even more surprising — again, I am both a motorcycle and Maranello fanatic — Enzo also championed a motorcycle racing team named, unsurprisingly this time, Scuderia Ferrari. This was in 1932, well before he built his famed 125 S in 1947, and, like his first car racing ventures — managing Alfa Romeo’s race team — his motorcycles were sourced from other manufacturers. But proving that il Commendatore knew where patriotism stopped and ruthless devotion to winning began, his racers were all British, the Rudges and Nortons his team raced from 1932 to 1934 all proven race-winners.
According to no less an authority that Ferrari.com, the team won the first race it entered, Guglielmo Sandri riding a Rudge 350-cc TT Replica to victory in the Modena Grand Prix in the spring of 1932. The team went on to win three national titles — Giordano Aldrighetti in 1932 (250-cc class) and 1933 (500-cc class), and Aldo Pigorini in 1934 (350-cc class). By the end of 1934, however, the little Rudges were no longer competitive, and Ferrari abandoned motorcycle racing to concentrate on four wheels. The rest is, of course, well-documented history, except for the fact the team won its final two-wheeled appearance at the 1934 Trofeo Acerbo.
A champion in three divisions with a total of 44 victories in three short years, all bookended by winning the first and last race he entered: even on two wheels, Enzo Ferrari was the master of the dramatic statement. The motorcycling world is definitely lesser for him never having built a superbike with his famed Prancing Horse.But, perhaps we’re all better off. I know I probably am. I already have a garage full of classic Hondas I can barely afford. I’d be living under the lift if Enzo had built bikes.
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