CarBrandLogos archive · Bimota · 1991

BimotaTesi

Hub-centre steering taken from a university thesis into a showroom.

Photo: Mr.choppers · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Bimota history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Bimota Tesi, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

The name means thesis, and that is literally where the machine came from: Pierluigi Marconi's engineering project at the University of Bologna, which replaced the telescopic front fork with a swingarm and put the steering pivots inside the front wheel hub. The purpose is to separate braking loads from steering, so that the front end neither dives nor changes geometry when the brakes are applied hard, which in theory lets a rider brake later and deeper into a corner.

Bimota DB 5 Mille prototype01

Design and engineering

Bimota worked on the idea through the 1980s, including a racing prototype with electro-hydraulic steering, before the Tesi 1D reached production in 1990 with a liquid-cooled 90-degree Ducati desmo V-twin in a frame of machined aluminium plates.

Bimota Tesi 2D · Eric Lin from San Francisco, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

In production

It worked, and almost nobody bought it. The system was expensive to build, added weight at the front, and asked riders to relearn what a front end should communicate. Production ended in 1994. Bimota has kept returning to the concept regardless, with the Tesi 2D and 3D, and after Kawasaki took a stake in the company in 2019, with the supercharged Tesi H2. Few ideas in motorcycling have been so persistently pursued on so little commercial evidence.

Bimota Tesi 1DES 2 · Philippe on fr.wikipedia.org · CC BY 3.0

At a glance