Alan Cathcart | July 28, 2016
Before the great Massimo Tamburini left this life, he started the Tamburini T12 Massimo project that would define his legacy. And it was fittingly completed by his son.
The late Massimo Tamburini’s name is synonymous on two wheels with beauty, excellence, innovation and performance, the collective fruits of his heartfelt passion and consummate artistry, which together, have combined to produce motorcycles of breathtaking effectiveness and timeless appeal.
With Tamburini’s retirement from MV Agusta in December 2008 after its acquisition by Harley-Davidson, it was widely assumed that his ongoing creation of ultra-desirable and literally iconic designs like the Bimota SB2, Cagiva 500GP, Ducati 916, Cagiva Mito and MV Agusta F4/Brutale, had finally come to an end. But like all great artists, Massimo had one final masterpiece kept up his sleeve, which, with the expiry on January 1, 2012, of the non-compete contract he’d signed when cashing in his MV equity after the Harley takeover, he immediately began turning the ideas he’d been juggling around in his mind for the previous 36 months into reality.
To read this in Cycle News Digital Edition Magazine, click HERE.
Photography by Kel Edge and Tamburini Corse
Powered by a four-cylinder BMW S 1000 RR engine, the Tamburini T12 Massimo⎯T for Tamburini, 12 because the project officially began in 2012, and Massimo as a play on words, since besides being his forename it also means “ultimate” in Italian—was intended to be the ne plus ultra of performance motorcycling—the most refined, most uncompromisingly effective and most downright beautiful sportbike the world had yet seen. It was a design, which a combination of commercial and budgetary restrictions, as well as ever more onerous homologation rules, had thus far prevented Tamburini from producing, as the ultimate expression of his creative passion.
Tragically, though, with the T12 project well under way, in September 2013 Massimo Tamburini was diagnosed with lung cancer, leading to his early death in April 2014, aged 70. Though he’d worked hard to try to complete the bike before he passed away, it wasn’t to be. Instead, it was left to his son Andrea, 47, to bring the project to fruition, himself a talented designer who’d worked alongside his dad officially since 1988, after looking over his shoulder from a very young age. Indeed, Andrea was originally responsible for creating the MV Agusta Corse aftermarket catalog dripping with magnesium and carbon-fiber goodies, developed in an adjacent unit to his father’s CRC workshop in San Marino. But after his dad’s departure from MV, Andrea turned that company over to Harley-Davidson and founded Tamburini Corse in San Marino with the support but no involvement of his father, continuing to make special parts and restyled bodywork mainly for MVs, but also some Ducati models. It was Tamburini Corse which in March this year broke the news via its website of the completion of two examples of the T12 Massimo, one of which had already been tested by ex-World champion Luca Cadalora at the Modena autodromo, with promising results.
This utterly gorgeous farewell design by the Michelangelo of motorcycle design just begged to be viewed up close and personal. So, leaning on my friendship with the Tamburini family, I asked Andrea (whom I’ve known since he was a teenybopper!) if he’d make an exception to the no-visitors rule that has kept the shutters of the designer-chic Tamburini Corse HQ in San Marino firmly down for all but a few lucky members of the press. Having done so, who better to recount how and why the T12 project came about than Andrea himself, the man responsible for seeing his father’s last project through to fulfillment? So, here’s what he had to say.
From Father To Son
“After Papa passed away, we completed assembly of the bikes here at Tamburini Corse, and on March 1, 2016 our family formed Massimo Tamburini srl to take care of the commercialization of the T12 Massimo. There are seven shareholders in all.
“We revealed the project online on March 6, and the response has been literally incredible. I personally had high expectations, because I knew how respected my father was in the world of motorcycling, but the global reaction to the bike’s debut online—not even in the metal—was way over and beyond that. After the website had been online for just 20 minutes the site manager called me to say that there had been a highly anomalous amount of traffic on it, which already amounted to 20,000 hits!
“We’d opened a Facebook page the day before, and by the end of the first week, that had 850,000 friends. We honestly haven’t thought about a price, apart from working out how much it’s cost us so far to create these two prototypes. We floated the idea that a limited-edition hand-built replica might cost as much as $330,000, just to see what the public response would be, and let’s just say we were very surprised at it!
“Okay, so how did the T12 Massimo come about? My dad thought about the design for three years, but never produced any drawings until the day the no-compete clause ended in January 2012. He then gathered the three industry partners and me around him, and explained that his objective was to produce a bike, which incorporated what he termed the essence of motorcycling. He told us this was going to be his last project, and he wanted it to encompass all that he had learned in his life as a designer, and to incorporate as many of the elements he hadn’t been able to adopt in the past on any of his previous designs, for whatever reason, commercial, financial, etc.
“At that stage he had no concerns about his health, but even so he accepted and even intended that this would be his last great design. Sadly, he found out he was ill in September 2013, and his health went downhill very fast after that. He passed away in April 2014.”
The German Connection
“Why choose a BMW engine? Even though it wasn’t Italian, he believed it had the greatest potential for development. He also admired its design, its reliability and the performance it had achieved in superbike racing. He believed it was the best four-cylinder engine available in the marketplace and he reasoned that what he intended should be the finest no-compromises motorcycle yet designed should have a similarly excellent engine. He also wanted it to be a bike built to be used on the racetrack in top-level competition, rather than stuck in someone’s front room as a two-wheeled oil painting, but an effective, high-performance motorcycle, more than just a beautiful one, which would have had a super high level of attention focused on its performance and effectiveness. We had some aerodynamic studies made by a Swiss company, which confirmed that in the form we have presented it, the T12 has an exceptionally good Cx figure, comparable to Marquez’s 2012 Honda, but I don’t think it looks so ugly, do you?
“We never contacted BMW until the bike was already built and being tested, so we didn’t get the engine from them directly, as many people have speculated. Absolutely not—we did it completely under the radar as far as they were concerned. We bought an S 1000 RR from the Rimini BMW dealer, took the engine out of it, and measured up the mounting points to build the frame. Then, through Davide Tardozzi, who, of course, was Bimota’s factory rider just after my father left them, but whom he knew well and was at that time manager of the BMW factory superbike team, we obtained that bike’s oil sump and water-pump housing which, being machined from solid aluminum, are different on the superbike racer from the road bike. We wanted to make sure that the BMW superbike engine would fit in the frame in the hope we might one day obtain one. That’s all in the future. At the moment the bike which Luca Cadalora tested for us at Modena has a street bike S 1000 RR motor fitted with the side-exit Arrow titanium race exhaust, but the bodywork and frame are ready to accept a superbike race motor once we obtain one.
“Once we had finished the bike, we contacted BMW and invited them to come and look at it. They came twice. The second time we had the top people in the BMW Motorrad design and marketing divisions, who were literally lost for words! My father’s work has that effect on people. I remember very well what you wrote after seeing the Ducati 916 prototype for the first time six months before it was launched! BMW took the T12 and analyzed it in depth and admitted they would find it very difficult to achieve such a high level of detail in so many elements, being a large-series production company rather than a small design house. Therefore, they told us they would be happy to give us whatever we need to pursue the project into limited production, because for them—BMW—it’s an honor to see their engine forming the basis of such a design. This will include supplies of their highest-spec 235 bhp superbike engine as and when we want it, or else a superstock version for less extreme performance. If we do put it into limited production, as seems increasingly likely, we will be able to offer customers the choice of such engines.”
That Gorgeous Chassis
“The T12 chassis has the hybrid design which my father typically favored, with the engine used as a fully stressed structural component. The cast-magnesium steering head is attached to a very stiff space-frame made from military-level steel tubing, which allows us to cut down on wall thickness and thus reduce weight without sacrificing stiffness. This in turn is attached via special bolts to the twin rear side plates which are also cast in magnesium, and in which the single-sided swingarm likewise cast in magnesium pivots, while the Marchesini wheels are both forged magnesium to my father’s design. There are Ergal 55 aluminum mounting plates milled from solid attached to the sides of the cylinder head to carry the bodywork, while all the footrests and linkages are also billet aluminum.
“Naturally, the chassis is fully adjustable in terms of steering geometry and suspension settings, as well as having a variable-height swingarm pivot. The choice of the various materials comprising the chassis has a technical objective, because of the resonant vibration, which can amplify itself dynamically to the point that it upsets the overall handling and suspension compliance, and can especially create chatter. Using a variety of materials, which have different points of resonance, enhances the compliance of the suspension at extreme angles of lean. So making a part in magnesium has one degree of resonance, making it in aluminum another, and in carbon fiber a third. My father designed the T12 to be able to control the chassis resonance in such a way that it enhances the motorcycle’s behavior. This is why he developed the modular frame design concept, to be able to do this.”
“He also developed—and patented—a means of altering the transverse rigidity of the chassis. He did this with a system, which subtly allows you to vary to a micrometric extent the stiffness of the chassis. This is important once you adopt more than around 45 degrees of lean angle in a turn, because the suspension is no longer able to work truly effectively, and forces are translated back into the frame. If you’re able to finely adjust the transverse flexibility of the frame to an appropriate degree, you can then adjust the suspension to better respond to these demands, as well as to optimize the performance and durability of your rear tire. Our patented system permits that.
“The same considerations apply to the single-sided cast magnesium swingarm, which was my father’s chosen design ever since the Ducati 916 almost 25 years ago. Why? There are three reasons and the first two are the least important: it looks nice, and you can change the rear tire quickly. But the third reason he always chose this is the most important: With the constant improvement of rear-tire performance week by week—not year by year—it remains vital that you should achieve perfect torsional stiffness for the swingarm, but it’s increasingly desirable to have some transverse flexibility which results in a degree of controlled deflection of the rear contact patch, which you cannot obtain with a dual-sided swingarm.”
Devine Components
“All the components on the T12 are the maximum possible available in their sector. So the Brembo Monobloc brakes are wet-weather components from MotoGP—my father thought about fitting carbon brakes, but decided against them in terms of practicality—complete with Staubli metal lines and quick-release connections. The Öhlins suspension also comes from MotoGP, but the T12 Massimo has an even higher level of rear suspension performance than a MotoGP bike, because of a modification which Papa persuaded Öhlins to make to their race shock. This entailed fitting a counter-spring within the body of the shock—which was very difficult for them to do, but they succeeded. This delivers such an outstanding level of compliance and performance that Luca Cadalora, when he tested the T12 at Modena autodromo, did not make a single adjustment to the shock rear setting, not even a single click! It’s highly likely that now that Öhlins has had the validity of this design confirmed, they will incorporate it in their MotoGP shocks for 2017!
“My father chose forged-magnesium wheels rather than carbon-fiber ones, because he hoped that one day someone might race the T12 in whatever form of competition it would be admitted to, and that would have required metal wheels. To that extent this was a compromise forced on him by the rules. But even with these wheels fitted the dry weight of the T12 Massimo is 340 pounds, which I believe is exceptional for this type of motorcycle fitted with a series production four-cylinder engine. Sorry, but I can’t give you the exact weight distribution, which we prefer to keep to ourselves at present, but I will only say that it has a slight forward-weight bias, but not an exceptional one. In the same way, we prefer not to disclose the steering geometry and wheelbase figures at the moment—but let’s just say that these are all comparable to current MotoGP figures, and that while the bike looks very small and quite short, the wheelbase is over 55 inches.”
Carbon Dream
“The bodywork is entirely made in carbon fiber, and that includes the 5.6-gallon gas tank, which it’s important to underline is a load-bearing structural component of the chassis. As is normal these days, the front section comprises the airbox, which is larger than the standard BMW one, with all the throttle bodies and trumpets housed within it. The fuel-tank proper commences at the filler cap, then reaches back beneath the seat as part of the chassis, with the seat mounted directly on it—there’s no rear subframe. This design employs many structural techniques from Formula One, where the fuel tanks are also full load-bearing components, similarly made from carbon fiber.
“My father took pains to ensure the mechanical components of the bike were completely accessible—within two minutes the bike can be stripped to its bare essentials. The dashboard and all electronics come from MoTeC, and the wiring harness employs aerospace technology. My father intended that this should be strictly a racing motorcycle, so we have no headlamps or street equipment considered.
Cadalora’s Calling
“It’s important to stress that my father was completely responsible for not only the overall concept of the bike, but also the choice of all the components incorporated in it from outside suppliers. All that I have done with my partners is to complete assembly of two prototypes of the T12, and demonstrate its efficacy by going to Modena autodromo for Luca Cadalora to test it, as my father had asked him to do before he passed away. First of all, I want to thank Luca for undertaking this task—he refused to take a single euro for doing so, saying that it was an honor to be the one asked to ride it—and also Yamaha with whom he is contractually bound as support for Valentino, for releasing him to make the test. But the most remarkable thing is that in four uninterrupted hours of running, the T12 Massimo ran perfectly. Luca commented from the first how light the bike felt, and how easily it steered. As I said before, he didn’t make a single change to the rear-suspension settings, which my father had determined two and a half years previously, but worked quite a bit on the front suspension, which he found too stiff for someone like him coming from 250GP, where he likes the front wheel to talk to him.
“Pirelli kindly furnished us with tires, and in those four hours he found a softer setting he really liked that suited the tire well.”
The Perfect Tribute
“At the stage that Papa passed away the only things we didn’t yet have to assemble the motorcycle were the machined magnesium castings for the chassis—everything else had been delivered, including the bodywork and other frame components. I brought many of the parts to show him in his bedroom, and I assured him before he left us that I would complete the project exactly as he had conceived it, so that’s what I have done. He was working on the project right up until the day before he died, and thanks to Paolo Picchi that day I was able to take him an incredibly realistic computer image of the finished bike, as well as photos of all the components we’d assembled, so he could be comforted by the knowledge that the bike would live after him, and that’s what’s happened. He was always very self-critical of his designs—some he’d say he hated, and wanted to start all over again to design them “properly!” Well, this time, even though he was quite heavily sedated, he looked at all the images I’d brought him of the T12, which I personally think looks best from the rear three-quarter view, which it’s always difficult for designers to get right because of the visual dominance of the rear tire. He looked through them all, then pointed at the rear three-quarter shot and said, ‘This is a beautiful bike—it even looks good from the rear!’ ” CN
To read this in Cycle News Digital Edition Magazine, click HERE.
To read more Cycle News motorcycle reviews, click HERE
For more Cycle News Sport Bike motorcycle reviews, click HERE