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Sep 30, 2008 12:20 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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The latest lame amateur motorcycle design to hit the web is this concept Ferrari, designed by Israeli design student Amir Glinik. In keeping with his genre’s established parameters, it’s a complete non-starter function-wise, but does have a cool looking Enzo-based V4 engine, which seems to put people into a tizzy. We don’t know what it is about freshman motorcycle designs. Why do people with no knowledge of or passion for bikes create them? Why do they have such resonance with a mass audience, with the blogosphere constantly picking them up despite their lack of real engineering, real design and good looks? If everyone is so fascinated with bikes, why aren’t they just really into cool new bikes like the Quantya Strada?
It’s the aforementioned V4 engine that forms the motive force behind Glinik’s design. Essentially an Enzo’s V12 with eight of the cylinders lopped off, the resulting capacity is two liters, huge for a motorcycle engine, rendering this bike more of a boulevardier than a performance bike with its weight. That cruiser-like lack of ability is backed up by the wheelbase, which looks impossibly long, the low center of gravity which will slow down direction changes and require more lean per-speed in corners than the low pegs, huge fairing and Ferrari-style pedals will allow. Of course, there’s also the belt drive and the limited movement and feedback allowed by this particular girder fork arrangement to keep it from actually riding like you’d think a motorcycle made by Ferrari would.
If Ferrari were actually to design a motorcycle, we’d hope it would draw enough inspiration from the firm’s supercar to give it a performance emphasis, while leaving the actual engineering up to people that know how to make bikes work. We’d imagine they’d continue their proud tradition of stealing buying engine technology from Yamaha, maybe in the form of the 2009 R1’s long-bang engine technology. Doing both of those things would result in a fast, desirable motorcycle that would do a much better job of fitting in with the rest of the Ferrari brand than this abomination does. Look at the way the upcoming S1000RR has adapted technology from BMW’s M-division, but housed it in a thoroughly conventional package for an example. But, of course, Ferrari will never actually make a bike, so all of this is just meaningless speculation. [via Wired]
Send an email to Wes Siler, the author of this post, at wes@jalopnik.com.
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