“A once in a lifetime chance to come up with something truly exceptional,” said president of Piaggio Roberto Colaninno a decade ago when the firm was figuring out the landmark bike that would celebrate Moto Guzzi’s 100th birthday.
And while Guzzi was forced to celebrate with a subdued centenary party at its Mandello del Lario factory on the shores of Lake Como, owing to ongoing Covid restrictions, it’s making up for lost time with the one-year-later-thanplanned launch of its next-generation model platform, the V100 Mandello.
Conceived as an innovative ‘hybrid’ model – not in the dual-motor sense of the word, but in the bike’s ability to switch between being an urban nakedbike and a mileeating sports-tourer – the V100 Mandello ticks an array of new boxes for the historic brand, and indeed the global motorcycle market. Firstly, it’s Moto Guzzi’s firstever liquid-cooled production roadbike, its first with DOHC valve gear, its first to be fitted with a gear-driven counterbalancer, and its first to embrace advanced electronics including a six-axis IMU to provide data for the ride-by-wire throttle, cornering ABS and other digital amenities. Yes, the long-awaited 21st century Moto Guzzi model which Colaninno has been promising he’d bankroll for the past decade or more.
But was it worth waiting for? Only one way to find out, and that was to ride it, which I did on the world launch – on a Sunday – along
