Ducati, Yamaha or even Aprilia and KTM may be names that sound familiar to you if I tell you to think of a motorcycle brand. However, if I tell you about Moto Guzzi, the name may not inspire you at all. This is a legendary motorcycle manufacturer that, after going through hell, was reborn from its ashes.
And he did it with a model practically created in an almost clandestine workshop: the Moto Guzzi V7 Sport.
Ascension. There are legendary brands that start doing one thing and then end up doing something completely different. Nintendo is an example: it started with cards and is now one of the leaders in video games. Moto Guzzi is one of those cases that were born with a single objective: technological excellence and passion for competition.
Founded in 1921 in the Italian town of Mandello del Lario, from the beginning they were clear that they wanted to contribute something to the conversation. An example is the 90º V engine that attracts so much attention on motorcycles. naked and even the American police. The V7 700 was a gem, but in the mid-60s… things started to go wrong.
Drop. The founders left, new managers (SEIMM) took over and the catastrophe was total. Not only were they losing sales at full speed, but they were moving further and further away from the competition tracks. They didn’t know which key to press, but they couldn’t sit still because they were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Military and police models helped the company in difficult times
Then an idea occurred to them: to loosen their wallets and sign someone who could restore the flame and pride to the team, which was seeing more and more Japanese motorcycles prevailing both in the market and on the tracks. That’s when they turned to Lino Tonti. And they couldn’t have hit the nail on the head more.
The V7 Sport ‘dachshund’
to the basement. Tonti was an engineer with experience in other now historic brands such as Benelli, Bianchi or Gilera and, as soon as he arrived at Moto Guzzi, he knew what he had to do: all in with that transverse twin cylinder. The problem is that the new managers were not going to give him much funds either. They were asking for the impossible, but Tonti and his partner Alcide Biotti must have taken it as a challenge and, in their own workshop due to the difficulties of the Mandello factory, they completely redesigned the motorcycle.
The chassis changed completely, opting for a removable double cradle, it was more rigid and lower and removing the engine was much easier, key for competition. That transverse engine was maintained at 90º, but the motorcycle had changed its profile, being lower and longer.
Breaking records. That earned it the nickname ‘Dachshund’, our sausage dog, although it officially went down in history as Moto Guzzi V7 Sport. The objective was to stay at 750 cc with a weight of 200 kg and a speed of over 200 km/h and it looked good, but it had to be tested. It was the pilot Umberto Todero who piloted it at the end of the 60s, and I don’t want to imagine the smile of Tonti and Biotti when their creation set 19 world speed records.
The official figures are 748.4 cc, 205 kg and a peak of 208 km/h. They had achieved it, but also, in international tests carried out by magazines, the V7 Sport was chosen to compete against the Japanese that ate the brand’s toast years ago. Specifically, against the Kawasaki 750 March IV and against the Honda CB 750 Four.
The V7 is still alive, although it is very different from the one 50 years ago
Mito. Thus, as a result of that work with few resources, but with the motivation to recover the lost honor for a house brand, the now legendary V7 Sport was born with its red chassis. That chassis was so popular that they even baptized it ‘Tonti frame’, being used in many models today both by external brands and by Moto Guzzi itself.
Today, the V7 lives on, although little remains of that dachshund shape of the 1969 V7 Sport that sits today on the Olympus of classic sports bikes. And the brand? Well, that is a separate story, since they have been passing through hands since SEIMM took over the company, passing through Aprilia itself and, later, through Piaggio when it took over Aprilia.
Images | Serge PIOTIN aka Sergio, AVMOTO, Thesupermat, Antramir
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