SELWYN STICKLER IS FED UP WITH PEOPLE telling him that his Benelli is just an Italian copy of a Honda CB500. “Look,” he says, “Benelli didn’t need to copy Honda to make a four. It was racing a 250cc inline-four back in 1939, and what’s more, it was liquid-cooled, supercharged, and produced 52bhp at 10,000rpm. That was eight years before Soichiro Honda bolted a 50cc two-stroke generator engine to a bicycle frame, and 20 years before the first Japanese four-cylinder motorcycle, so who copied who?”
Selwyn has a very good point, of course. The Italians have a long history of making four-cylinder motorcycles. When Benelli announced in 1960 that it had built a four-cylinder 250, some thought even that was an inferior copy of the RC160 Honda had introduced a year earlier. But come on – who believes that Benelli’s technicians ever got the chance to look inside an RC Honda?
Designed by Savelli, who had worked on several race engines with Giovanni Benelli in the past, the racing air-cooled Benelli four used a 44mm bore (just like the RC160) and featured double overhead camshafts driven by
