NARROW ESCAPE

Five years ago Italian trophy marque Moto Morini came pretty close to joining the many other defunct brands from all our two-wheeled yesterdays. But the company’s then owner Ruggero Jannuzzelli was able to invest sufficient capital to keep it af loat while searching for someone with the resources and commitment to bring Morini back to the big time on a permanent basis. And in October 2018 he cemented the deal that saw Chen Huaneng, the owner of Chinese scooter and minimoto manufacturer Zhongneng Vehicle Group, acquire 100 percent ownership of Moto Morini.

In my exclusive interview with him that month [see attached] Chen stated his intentions to immediately develop a range of Moto Morini models with 500-800cc parallel-twin engines. These would financially underpin the highend 1200cc V-twins, which the company has manufactured exclusively for the past two decades since its 2003 revival – having been killed off in 1996. Well, he’s been good to his word, and exactly three years later the Moto Morini X-Cape 650 adventure bike has entered production on schedule at the Zhongneng factory in Taizhou, 400km south of Shanghai, for sale all over the world.

The X-Cape is powered by the well-established liquid-cooled DOHC eight-valve parallel-twin motor with a 180-degree crankshaft, offset chain camshaft drive, and a single gear-driven counterbalancer produced by Zhongneng’s neighbours CFMoto, which has been in production since 2011. Tens of thousands of examples of the four different models so far in CFMoto’s growing roster of midsized motorcycles have been sold all over the world since then, in the process acquiring a