Last year Italian trophy brand Moto Morini made a successful start on its journey down the comeback trail after its acquisition by Chinese manufacturer Zhongneng Vehicle Group in October 2018. Its first new model to reach the marketplace under the new ownership, the parallel-twin X-Cape 650 go-anywhere adventure bike, has been a sales hit all over the world after entering production late in 2021 in Taizhou, 400km south of Shanghai, having been entirely developed at the Moto Morini HQ in Trivolzio, outside Milan. Now it’s been joined in the ever-growing number of Moto Morini dealerships globally – and Australia isn’t far away – by two new models based on the same platform: the Seiemmezzo (meaning 6½, a tribute to the iconic 3½ V-twin which put Morini on the map in the 1970s, with 85,000 examples sold in a decade) STR (or street) and SCR (scrambler).
Like the X-Cape, these two new models are both powered by the well-established liquid-cooled 649cc DOHC eight-valve parallel-twin engine produced by Zhongneng’s near-neighbour CFMoto – their factories are just 40km apart. This carries a 180° – so one-up, one-down – crankshaft, offset chain camshaft drive and a single gear-driven counterbalancer. It has been in production since 2011. Tens of thousands of examples so far of the five different models it powers in CFMoto’s growing roster of midsized
