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TASK FORCE: BIMOTA TESI H2

Take the world’s quickest production engine and one of motorcycling’s most iconic companies and, as Bimota’s tagline succinctly puts it, the revolution continues

Bimota’s announcement one year ago that Kawasaki had acquired a 49.9 percent share in the born-again Italian boutique manufacturer, and that the first model created by the new partnership would be the supercharged Tesi H2 made headlines. Production of the 250 examples of the limited-edition Kawasaki Ninja H2-powered model is slated to begin this month at the rate of five bikes a week, thus reviving the Tesi name exactly 30 years after it first reached the marketplace via the Ducati-engined Tesi 1D launched in 1990.

It wants to bring the claimed handling improvements of separating the suspension, braking and steering functions by means of the firm’s trademark hub-centre design format, to a new generation of customers via the fastest street-legal motorcycle the world may ever know.

That’s according to Dr. Tesi, aka Pierluigi Marconi, 61, who conceived the original such design almost 40 years ago at Bologna University before joining Bimota in 1984 and bringing it to market in 1990 via the Tesi 1D. Since then, he’s designed a series of functionally acclaimed more conventional motorcycles, not all of them for Bimota, before rejoining the specialist manufacturer as Chief operations Officer in May last year. However, Marconi had already been contacted by the project’s mastermind, Kawasaki Heavy Industries executive Hiroshi Ito, in October 2018 to alert him to the possibility that Bimota might be revived, and to sound out his availability to rejoin the company, should that happen – and if so, what kind of bike he’d like to build first?

Check out the full story of our first ride on the Tesi H2 in the current issue.