A Marriage OF Convenience
When he passed away in December 2015 just a couple of weeks after his 90th birthday, Italian bike icon Arturo Magni could be said to have truly made his mark on motorcycle history. Even if he hadn't started building the streetbikes bearing his name more than 40 years ago, Magni would still have been a legend in his lifetime, a backroom boy made famous by the serial success of the MV Agusta Grand Prix race team.
As the leader of the small band of men responsible for creating and running Count Domenico Agusta's two-wheeled Ferraris during their 26 years of GP dominance, Magni was the driving force behind the 75 World Championships won by such racing legends as John Surtees, Mike Hailwood, Carlo Ubbiali, Giacomo Agostini and Phil Read. During Magni's reign as team manager charged with overseeing the entire operation of MV Agusta's Reparto Corse, the red and silver'fire engines' dominated the prestigious 500GP class for more than a quarter of a century, even in the face of Honda's challenge in the 1960s - until the FIM's short-sighted noise regulations brought that era to a close. But when that finally happened, Arturo Magni took on another challenge, by becoming a motorcycle manufacturer in his own right.
Magni was born in 1925 in Arcore, a small market town the other side of the wall from the Monza Autodromo - a town that until 1993 was for more than 80 years the home of Italy's oldest and most historic bike manufacturer, Gilera. In fact, motorcycles were originally of little interest to Arturo, who as a boy was more interested in building model aircraft, then later designing and constructing the full-size gliders with which he became a star turn at pre-WW2 air shows. In 1942, he won the Italian powerless endurance title in his own self-made glider with a three-metre wingspan, though perhaps ironically his first paid job in those
