Fuel’s gold!
When launched in 1997, Bimota’s 500cc two-stroke V Due was hailed as the ‘real deal’.
Editor of CMM Bertie Simmonds tells me that back in the mid-1990s bikers were eagerly awaiting some form of 500cc two-stroke race-replica, because that was what was being raced in 500cc GPs. Back then they didn’t have computer-generated graphics of such flights of fancy, instead dodgy journalists like Bert from a particular weekly biking paper would ring up a graphic artist and describe some bike they’d heard rumours about and go from there. Often, rumours of two-stroke race replicas from Yamaha (a Wayne Rainey YZR500 for the road) or Honda’s Mick Doohan rep would materialise in print, but never be manufactured. The Bimota turned all that on its head.
While in the early 1990s there were rumours of Bimota joining the 500cc GP circus with their own two-stroke racer – perhaps with the funky front-end
