Some teenage boys dream of girls, booze, and getting behind the wheel of a car… I did. But I also lusted after something most of my mates didn’t – in the form of some saucy Italian twins. To be more precise, I wanted an Aprilia RSV Mille or a Ducati 999.
They were the pin-ups of my adolescence, with all the right curves in all the right places, emitting the kind of seductive sounds that made me go weak at the knees. Unfortunately, at 16 years old, an RS50 was as close I could get to these dream machines, but my passion for the aforementioned particulars never faded.
Life’s a funny old game, don’t you think? As I write this – older, fatter, and with a meaty mortgage floating above my head – I am having to pinch myself at the situation I’m now in. For those of you who get the mag regularly (you’re awesome, thank you), you’ll have probably clocked that three years ago I bought a ‘box of bits’ Mille for £500 from my mate. With the help of my good friends Clive, Rob, and Griff at AP Workshops (plus many more good folk), we did something special with that Aprilia… not just resurrecting it from its destitute state, but adding a sprinkling of spice. The aim was to keep the bike’s silhouette the same but to subtly spec it up with contemporary goodness… and the way we went about it meant I never broke the bank – at least not by enough to make my wife notice. At a rough guess, I’d say about £4000 went into that pot, which is what you’d pay for a top drawer original RSV these days, albeit without all the fancy stuff on the bike we built, dubbed a Mille ‘CW’, in memory of Clive.
Four grand is a substantial sum to me, but it wouldn’t even get me a tickle if I were to have lunged after the Aprilia’s counterpart – Ducati’s 999. It might not have been everyone’s cup of tea back in the day, but it’s a model that brought huge success to the brand on the track and is one of the most winning models the Bologna boys and girls ever produced. To me, it brings back fond memories of Hodgson, Toseland, Xaus, and so many others scrapping hard on the World Superbike scene, plus the likes of Lavilla and Haslam at home in BSB. That thing won races and championships galore but somehow flopped in the showroom.
Call me weird, but I’ve always considered it one of the best-looking motorcycles ever made, and I think more and more people are warming to that idea as prices are skyrocketing even for the base model machines. And if you’re inclined to purchase one of the fruitiest examples out there, the 999R, you’ll need to have about £15-20k kicking around under your mattress… or a bloody good mate who’s happy to let you keep hold of his – cheers, Al!
For me, the question is whether the huge investment in the Ducati is worth it or if going about building your own trick bike, such as my Aprilia, for a fraction of the cost is the better thing to do? Do you build it or do you buy it? It’s a massive question, up there alongside the best way to save the planet or how
