Eggcentric Etceterini
“The Catria family formed the backbone of Motobi’s future four-stroke range.”
Even by the standards of Italy’s Etceterini array of little-known marques back in the 1950s, Motobi is an obscure subplot to the ongoing soap opera that the ever-changing panorama of Italian motorcycling represents.
Characteristically, the company only ever existed because of a family squabble which saw Giuseppe Benelli, eldest of the six brothers whose mother Teresa had set them up in a mechanical repair workshop in 1911 as a prelude to attaching the Benelli badge to their own range of motorcycles from 1921 onwards, walk out of the family factory in 1948 and cross the street to found his own rival marque. Its products were at first merely identified by a large letter ‘B’ on the fuel tank – nothing else, and for over a decade the two companies coexisted in barely suppressed enmity in the city of Pesaro on Italy’s Adriatic Coast, later home of such sporting names as Morbidelli, MBA, Sanvenero and more recently the Benelli QJ marque, now under the control of China’s Qianjiang.
But Giuseppe Benelli passed away in 1957 aged 78, leaving his sons Marco and Luigi to grapple with the task of keeping the firm afloat in the wake of the birth of the Fiat 500 car, which had brought the post Second World War boom in Italian motorcycling to such an abrupt end.
Motobi (as it was known from the mid-1950s onwards) had carved itself a good slice of that era’s booming Italian bike market, with a range of innovative models. Initially, these were all two-strokes, including from 1953 onwards a 200cc rotary-valve parallel-twin bearing the curious name of the B200 Spring Lasting (it’d take too long to explain!), whose pressed-steel frame and egg-shaped engine with its finned horizontal cylinders and vertical downdraught carbs, established the trademark format of future Motobi products.
Late 1955 saw its first four-stroke models appear, a 125/175cc OHV duo bearing the Catria name and designed by freelance engineer Piero Prampolini, whose later credits included the 350/500cc GP four-cylinder Benellis which Jarno Saarinen took to victory on their 1972 debut, and the Benelli 650cc Tornado, a late-60s Italian idea of what a British OHV parallel-twin should have been,
