Magni Sfida 1100
Magni Sfida 1100 | |
Manufacturer | |
---|---|
Production | 1991 |
Engine | Four stroke, 90°transverse V-twin, OHC, 2 valves per cylinder |
Compression ratio | 10.5:1 |
Ignition | Weber Marelli |
Transmission | 5 Speed |
Suspension | Front: Double steel cradle Forcello Italia forks rebound and preload adjustable with antidive. Rear: Twin Koni shocks, Magni Parallelogrammo suspension |
Brakes | Front: 2x 290mm discs 4 piston calipers Rear: Single 260mm disc |
Front Tire | 100/90 VR18 |
Rear Tire | 130/80 VR17 |
Weight | 195 kg / 430 lbs (dry), |
Fuel Capacity | 22 Liters / 5.8 US gal |
Manuals | Service Manual |
EngineEdit
The engine was a Air cooled cooled Four stroke, 90°transverse V-twin, OHC, 2 valves per cylinder. The engine featured a 10.5:1 compression ratio.
ChassisEdit
It came with a 100/90 VR18 front tire and a 130/80 VR17 rear tire. Stopping was achieved via 2x 290mm discs 4 piston calipers in the front and a Single 260mm disc in the rear. The front suspension was a Double steel cradle Forcello Italia forks rebound and preload adjustable with antidive. while the rear was equipped with a Twin Koni shocks, Magni Parallelogrammo suspension. The Sfida 1100 was fitted with a 22 Liters / 5.8 US gal fuel tank. The bike weighed just 195 kg / 430 lbs.
OverviewEdit
Magni Sfida 1100
From the moment the button is pressed to bring the big red machine to
life, the assault on your senses announces that this motorcycle could only have
been made by one company. The starter motor engages with a resounding kerthump,
the exhaust pipes thrubba a unique greeting, a blip of throttle sends the whole
bike rocking to the right. The rider's-eye view of an enormous cylinder head
poking out from below each side of the fuel tank merely confirms that this is a
Moto Guzzi.
Yes and no. The powerplant is a Guzzi Vee-twin all right, but the motorcycle
itself was constructed not at the old firm's plant in Mandello del Lario but
another spiritual home of Italian motorcycling.
The little town of Gallarate, a few miles north-west of Milan, was put firmly
on the map in the 1950s and '60s as the home of MV Agusta, the most successful
bike-racing factory of them all. And the silver-haired gent beaming proudly
through tinted specs as his latest creation is warmed-up is none other than
Arturo Magni, legendary chief mechanic of the Gallarate fire engines whose 17
straight 500cc world titles between 1958 and 74 embellished a period of grand
prix racing domination that seems barely believable today.
The Magni name on this machine's tank stands for Arturo and his sons Giovanni
and Carlo. For the last decade the trio have been building their own distinct
brand of Café-racer in the next-door village of Samarate, almost close enough to
the MV factory for the wail of an open-piped four to be audible - if only Agusta
were still building bikes as well as the helicopters they produce today.
MV's loss is the Magnis' gain, and their latest creation is the Sfida: the
Challenge. Its powerplant is a 90-degree transverse Vee as only Mandello makes
them; a Le Mans motor bought direct from the factory.
The look is unashamedly traditional, all the way from the spokes of the
18-iunch front wheel to the rear mudguard. The aircooled engine, the simple
steel-tube frame, and the classical lines of the bulky half-fairing, the long
tank and the simple seat - all finished in Italian racing red - give the Sfida a
timeless elegance.
The appearance is a little deceptive. Look more closely, and you notice that
the spoked front wheel is fitted not with some humble drum brake but with a pair
of large, fully-floating and very contemporary Brembo discs. Four-piston Gold
Line calipers bolt to thick Forcelle Italia forks whose tops hold knobs offering
a menu of five
rebound damping settings. (At
polished alloy, to which is the bottom of the leg,
attached an even shinier bracket compression
damping is three-
complete with warning lights, a V
way adjustable too.)
260kph (160mph) speedometer
The forks are gripped by a top and a big trad white-faced Veglia yoke fashioned from a big hunk of tacho. Hefty round-section steel
frame tubes run below the armpits of the sticking-out cylinders before
arching back to the swing arm pivot - or rather pivots, for this is where
the really interesting stuff begins.
The swinger consists of not one but two alloy members on each side, the word
"Parallelogramo" picked out on the top one giving a clue as to their purpose.
BMW's Paralever
and the similar system adopted by Guzzi themselves on the new Daytona 1000
are clever ways of reducing shaft-drive engines' traditional interference with
the rear suspension when the throttle is opened or closed. Magnis, you might be
surprised to learn, were fitted with basically the same thing five years ago.
The Sfida's combination of old and new technology is deliberate. On the wall
of the firm's office is a poster of the BMW-engine bike
they built in 1985. It wears an angular full-fairing, quite snazzy and
advanced for the time. But the customers preferred something more traditional.
"In Japan and Germany, where we sell many bikes, riders want their motorcycle
like an Italian bike of 20 years ago," said Giovanni, who at 31 is a year older
than brother and business partner Carlo. "They want very good brakes and forks
and so on, but in a style that they remember. That's why we designed the Classic
and the Arturo, our previous models, and now the Sfida."
So successful has the new bike been that production, which commenced in May
at a rate of 18 per month, cannot come close to matching demand. When I called,
everything the firm's five employees aimed to build in the next four months was
sold out. South London Guzzi specialists Rotadale, the British Magni importers,
currently quote a six-month wait for anyone wanting to place an order.
The bike retails for £9300 in its basic form with regular Brembo discs and
calipers, or for around ten grand with the optional floating discs and Gold Line
calipers. Powerplant of the base-model bike is stock Guzzi from airbox to
exhaust, including the 949cc Vee-twin engine from the current Le Mans, but an I
105cc kit is available on request to boost the standard 948 twin's 80bhp-ish
output by around lOObhp. (Rotadale boss Pietro Di Marino will also take on
tuning work, from a £700 porting-and-big-bore job to full £2,500 blowout which
includes modified pistons, a lightened crank and alloy clutch.)
The scarlet Sfida whose keys Giovanni handed me had the
I 100 kit fitted, and the big slugs hammering up and down inside the engine
made their presence felt as the bike shook and rolled in typical Guzzi fashion
when I cranked the equally traditional heavy-action twistgrip. Riding position
leans you across the big tank to the steep clip-ons. Footrests are slightly more
rearset than on a standard Le Mans, and give plenty of leg-room. The Sfida's a
fairly tall bike but, although not particularly light at 4301b, it felt quite
manageable.
We'd already come across its first major drawback, when lensman Goldcard and
I arrived at the Magni HQ on the outskirts of Gallarate to discover that the
bike was not registered and thus couldn't be ridden on the public road. Happily,
salvation was at hand. Arturo picked up the phone, and one long call later had
arranged for us to borrow Pirelli's extensive private test ground down the road
that afternoon. You got the impression they knew who Signor Magni was in these
parts.
Meanwhile I slipped out to get in some practice laps on the industrial area's
private access road. This was a narrow tarmac track comprising little more than
a couple of straights with a hairpin at either end, but it at
east allowed me to confirm that the Magni patent parallellogram swing arm was the business. (Unfortunately for Arturo and Sons, those patents were not all-embracing enough to earn the Magnis a fortune from BMW et al for infringing them...) Booming up to the first gear turn at the end of the street, flicking down through the gearbox, banking left and caressing the brake lever with respect for the gravelly surface, then dragging open the pair of 40mm Dellortos again coming out of the bend, was enough to convince me that the Magni swing arm system worked just as well as other firms' later variants. The Sfida simply shot back off up the road without a twitch from its firmish Koni shocks. A further advantage is that the Parallelogramo has not increased the wheelbase, in the way that the equally effective Bee-Em Paralever has done. Or at least if that has happened, then Magni's otherwise fairly Guzzi-like trellis has compensated. At 1480mm the Sfida's wheelbase is actually an inch shorter than its Le Mans country cousin. Rake and trail figures are a fairly Lemon-like 27 degrees and I 15mm, and help give the bike much the conservative handling feel you might expect. Tipping the 18-inch front wheel into a tight bend with a shove of the clip-ons was no problem, though by comparison with some current quickies the Magni's steering was a tad laborious. Conversely, the bike felt so planted and stable that it would take a hurricane to uproot it. Just as well, too, for after half-an-hour's enjoyable circulating I was just contemplating returning to camp when the Guzzi's gentle chuffing was drowned by a fearful blast of sound that would have sent an RGV250 veering ino the opposite hedge. A large and very unhappy signora was announcing in what I took to be colloqual Italian that she's had enough and would I getta the hell out of her life? I did, with a face to match the Sfida's paint. Fortunately Giovanni then indicated that the Pirelli track was about to become free, so we strapped the bike into his van and set off for the proving ground in the shadow of Malpensa, one of Milan's two main airports. The track was a brilliant place; all neatly laid-out handling circuits, artificial hills, water sprays for wet-weather tire-testing and so on. When the last Pirelli-shod Porcshe had cleared off and the man in the cap gave the go-ahead, I gratefully nosed the Sfida out onto what was effectively an immaculately-surfaced private racetrack. We'd been told to keep to a short-circuit loop at the one end, which was no hardship, but I couldn't resist one quick blat up the straightish section to give the Guzzi's big lungs some exercise. Just off tickover the Dellortos were a little spluttery but once the clutch was home the carburation cleared, the characteristic Guzzi low-frequency shaking - exaggerated a little by the big-bore engine -smoothed out, and the Sfida thundered off like a rampaging rhino in a Jacob's Club ad. The big Vee-twin's flat torque curve sent the tacho needle sweeping steadily towards the 7750rpm redline as the bike headed for a top speed of around I40mph. Vibration and the old pushrod mill's clicketty-whirring increased a little as the revs rose, but the Vee never failed to feel just like the relaxed, unstressed but wonderfully gutsy great lump it has always been. The anchors, not surprisingly, where even more efficient when it came to slowing down. The Magni has no Guzzi-style linked system, just those two floating-and-rattling Brembos up front and a smaller rear disc to help out. Grabbing a handful of Gold Line made the excellent forks earn their keep as the Sfida stopped with enough force to make me think that a fatter front wheel shod with something from Pirelli's current range might have been more suitable than the 100/ 90-section ribbed Phantom. But the Sfida isn't trying to compete with modern bikes on performance or anything else. More importantly, navigating the circuit fortunately revealed that the somewhat skinny Pirellis were not going to embarrass our hosts by proving the Magni's weakness. The tires gave enough grip for the sound of scraping centre-stand to demonstrate that the bike's ground clearance was the limiting factor when cornering on dry tarmac. Round and round I swooped in the sunshine, the restrained sound of the pipes (loud Lafranconis are another option, but don't tell the IMC) echoing round the test ground as the Sfida was caned for lap after lap, my chin on the wide red tank as a sweeping right-hand bend unwound onto the heat-hazy straight, I watched the tacho needle unwind across its huge white dial and heard the engine's pulse quicken again as the machine surged forward on a torrent of torque. The bike may not have been a factory MV Agusta, but the Gallarate sunshine and the watching Signor Magni (Giovanni this time, thankfully without stopwatch) gave more than a hint of what it must have been like for Surtees or Hailwood to test a new racer 30 years earlier. That's the great strength of the Magni Sfida: it's got performance, but most of all it's got breeding and soul. Count Agusta's great bikes are just a memory now, but Arturo and his boys are making sure that the MV spirit lives on in Gallarate. Source Bike 1990
Make Model | Magni Sfida 1100 |
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Year | 1991 |
Engine Type | Four stroke, 90°transverse V-twin, OHC, 2 valves per cylinder |
Displacement | 1064 cc / 64.9 cu-in |
Bore X Stroke | 92 x 82 mm |
Cooling System | Air cooled |
Compression | 10.5:1 |
Induction | 2x 40mm Dell'Orto |
Ignition | Weber Marelli |
Starting | Electric |
Max Power | 90 hp / 66 kW hp @ 7800 rpm |
Max Torque | 96 Nm / 9.7 kgf-m @ 6000 rpm |
Transmission | 5 Speed |
Final Drive | Shaft |
Front Suspension | Double steel cradle Forcello Italia forks rebound and preload adjustable with antidive. |
Rear Suspension | Twin Koni shocks, Magni Parallelogrammo suspension |
Front Brakes | 2x 290mm discs 4 piston calipers |
Rear Brakes | Single 260mm disc |
Front Tire | 100/90 VR18 |
Rear Tire | 130/80 VR17 |
Dry Weight | 195 kg / 430 lbs |
Fuel Capacity | 22 Liters / 5.8 US gal |