Bimota Furano
BIMOTA FURANO
RIDING THE WIND
CW RIDING IMPRESSION
JON F. THOMPSON
BIMOTAS ARE KNOWN FOR being exclusive, expensive, and maybe just a little controversial. That's a reputation the marque is sure to maintain, if the company's latest offering is any sort of example.
That offering is a lightweight, elegant confection called the YB8EI Furano. Furano, in the dialect used by fisherfolk around Rimini, Italy, where Bimotas are built, denotes a strong wind. Certainly that name has more romantic appeal than the YB8EI designation, but under its technoid surface, that designation carries its own sort of romance: The "EI" means that the bike, the latest addition to the well-regarded YB8 family, is fuel-injected.
The Furano possesses all the at tributes that have made the YB8 Dieci (Cycle World, May, 1991) a favorite among well-heeled enthusiasts. Just like the Dieci, it is light, stiff and pow erful, and it stops and handles. But the Dieci's focus has been broadened this year. It now is available as a singleseater or with a passenger seat. The Furano, meanwhile, is Bimota's ulti mate expression of the conventional hard-core, take-no-prisoners sportbike, complete with low-mount clip-ons, fully adjustable suspension, carbon fiber everything, modular wheels and an electronic engine-management system.
-~-~~c'-~ The Furano is faster than the Dieci. At a claimed 397 pounds dry, and with its claimed 164 horsepower, it smokes away from the 149-horsepower, 408pound Dieci in roll-ons. Its combina tion of lightness, power and excellent suspension makes the bike feel more like a Superbike that has been tamed for street use than a purpose-built lux ury-performance item. In reality, the Furano isa little of both those things.
First, its claimed weight is, for a liter-class bike, very low. This is made possible by very careful atten tion to detail, by design and manufac ture that make parts such as exhaust hangers and engine headstays look as delicate and as strong as the wing of a dragonfly. The use of very light wheels, composed of Akront alu minum rims bolted to three-spoke magnesium hubs, helps. And so does use of carbon-fiber--in the exhaust system, shift linkage, fenders and in the bike's unusual two-piece body work. Two pieces? Right: The 9.9pound tanktop, seat and rear section lifts off as a single unit with the re moval of three small bolts, and the 10.5-pound fairing is built in one piece to eliminate the heavy sections necessary where fairing panels over lap. It's a good system, even if it does make fairing removal a bit of a chore. Bimota spokesmen note that carbon fiber isn't particularly easy to work with. The company is forced to dis card one out of every three fairing sections because of manufacturing or finish defects.
The Furano is the only Bimota whose fairing gets the carbon-fiber treatment, but it shares some compo nents with other bikes in its family. It is based upon the same carefully weld ed and beautifully constructed alloy perimeter frame used by the other members of the YB8 clan. And just as the rest of the YB8s do, it uses a Yamaha FZR1000 engine. But its en gine's management system, suspen sion, bodywork and wheels all are specific to the YB8EI.
That engine-management system is built by Weber-Marelli, and uses essen tially the same Cpu as do the Ducati 851/888, the Moto Guzzi Daytona 1000 and Bimota's own Ducati-engined Tesi lDsr (see accompanying story). Through a system of remote sensors, that tail-mounted unit reads air temper ature, atmospheric pressure, rpm, throt tle position, coolant temperature and injection-and-ignition timing. The sys tem constantly adapts to changes in these parameters, with the result that ig nition timing and fuel mixture are man aged over the engine's entire load and rpm ranges with much greater accuracy than is possible with carburetors and conventional ignition systems.
For the most part. the system wo~ks very well. The bike starts easily from cold, and burning the leaded fuel still widely used in Italy, where we went to sample the bike, left a tell-tale medi urn-gray deposit inside the exhaust exit to signify that the air-fuel mixture was near the stoichiometrically correct 14:1. You don't really need to exam ine exhaust deposits to verify that, however. All you've got to do is ride the bike and sample its instant, clean throttle response at any speed or en gine load. Well, almost: Under heavy loads in high gears at low rpm, the en gine will buck and snatch. But it soon clears itself out. From 3000 to 7500 rpm, it pulis very hard-much harder than the carbureted FZR engine in the Dieci, which we rode for comparison. And from 7500 rpm on to its 11,500rpm redline, the bike accelerates as though launched from one of the large-bore lupara scatterguns Italian farmers once used to slaughter wolves. Power peak arrives at 10,500 rpm, which calculates to 165 mph in top gear. That's the maximum at which the Furano would pull my 6foot-4-inch, 225-pound frame on a near-empty autostrada just outside Rome. But my riding partner for this trip, 5-foot-7 Bimota test rider and 1990 Italian 600 and 750 champion Gianluca Galasso, can tuck down in side the bike's windscreen much more easily than I. Galasso says he's seen 11,500 top-gear rpm on the Furano's clock. That calculates to 182 miles per hour-plenty fast for a streetbike by anybody's standards, even if a bit of rear-tire slippage at top speeds almost certainly makes that figure optimistic by at least a few miles per hour.
Furano buyers likely will acquire the bike for reasons other than its amazing ability to compress distance, however. This is a sportbike, after all, not a Bon neville land-speed-record machine, and it's got the chassis, and the twisty-road performance, to prove it. The Ohlins shock is adjustable for spring preload and compression, as well as for re bound and compression damping, and includes a ride-hei~ht adjustment. The triple-taper 42mm Ohlins inverted fork is three-way adjustable, as well, with preload adjusters and 25-click rebound adjusters at the top of each fork leg, and 25-click compression adjusters at the bottom of each leg. Additionally, the top triple-clamp bearing is mount ed in an eccentric that will add or sub tract a half degree to the standard rake of 24.5 degrees. This aggressive geom etry works in conjunction with the bike's very stiff fork and 3.7 inches of trail to give very quick, very direct steering.
The Furano has brakes that match the quality and performance of the rest of its hardware. These are gold-line Brembo staggered-piston calipers. They are not the machined-from-billet racing units, but the highest-spec cast production units, and they put the squeeze on full-floating 12.6-inch steel rotors. Bimota chooses to field its bikes with braided-steel brake lines, and the result of this mixture of com ponents is the best stock streetbike brakes we've experienced, easily capa ble of fully controllable maximum-ef fort braking with no more than moderate pressure from two fingers on the brake lever.
This combination of stiff chassis, well-calibrated suspension, great brakes and wide Michelin Hi-Sport ra dials translates into the sort of impec cably crisp, secure handling a rider has every right to expect from a machine in the Furano's lofty price category. It changes direction right now, and it is ridiculously easy to flick from side to side in cornering transitions.
One important reason for the bike's sharp feel is its small size. It runs on a 55.9-inch wheelbase (about the same as a Honda CBR600), should prove lighter than the 432-pound CBR900RR, and is much narrower through its upper mid section than that new Honda. Its short wheelbase also means that hard accel eration will loft the front in the first three gears, while hard braking easily levitates that fat rear Michelin. Because it is so narrow, none of the Furano's hard parts touch pavement even during very aggressive street riding-not even the bike's tiny and beautifully made rearsetfootpegs. 1 ii
The Furano may be small, but sad dle time on it is no more physically demanding than time aboard any other repli-racer. Riders with long legs may find that their knees overlap the tank cover's knee indents by a bit, and as noted, tall pilots may not tuck under the bubble quite as efficiently as smaller riders. But they'll still find that the bike's seat, riding position and suspension calibration treat them very well. Enough airflow comes over the front of the bike to reduce the weight on a rider's wrists once he's at speed; the seat, while no touring throne, is comfortable by sportbike standards; and the suspension, defi nitely firm, is at least not so ungiving as to be harsh.
What you do notice while you're aboard the Furano, in addition to its blistering performance and brilliant handling, is that the aura of sound from this bike is different from that of any other streetbike you're likely to have ridden. The jingle of the bike's floating brake rotors, noise from the tires, suspension and engine all rever berate through the bike's bodywork, which, because of its lightness and stiffness, works to transfer sound just the way the body of a fine acoustic guitar does. The noise levels never be come objectionable, mind you; they're just an ever-present signal that you're aboard something special.
So the Furano is a very nicely devel oped and finished piece of equipment. The only rough edge we noticed dur ing our brief introduction to the bike concerned some paint overspray on the inside of the fairing edges just below the windscreen-an unacceptable and highly visible quality-control lapse in a bike that costs, in Italy, the equiva lent of $37,900.
What the Furano will cost in the U.S. has not been established. The Furano's future, as far as the United States market is concerned, remains undecided for the most basic of reasons.
According to Aurelio Lolli, Bimo ta's manager of sales and marketing, European and American testing and homologation could total as much as $70,000. Lolli muses, "Will the num ber of Furanos sold in the U.S. be enough to justify this investment? That's the question."
We rather suspect that one way or another, at least a few Furanos will find their way stateside, if only to flesh out the holdings of well-heeled collectors. It would be a shame if that's all they do. This is a bike that's built to be ridden, the Ferrari F40 of the sportbike world. Its price and lim ited production-Lolli told CW that Bimota plans to build between 100 and 150 Furanos-will insure that it will be available to just a few riders. Those lucky few will get a taste of what it's like to ride an ultra-exotic streetbike that just happens to possess World Superbike performance.
