Quick Ride
QUICK RIDE
LAVERDA GHOST The once and future standard
WAY BACK IN 1966, Italian industrialist Francesco Laverda listened to his bike-mad son Massimo and took Moto Laverda for a short, bright ride to the Big Time. Now here we are, 30 years later, and Moto Laverda is back from the dead with a bike called, ironically, the Ghost.
The unfaired roadster is Laverda’s first new model since new owner Francesco Tognon rescued the company two years ago.
Using the fuel-injected, eightvalve, counterbalanced parallelTwin from the existing 650 sportbike, Tognon’s development team has created a less expensive ($9300) alternative to the Ducati Monster or Bimota Mantra.
To make the Ghost materialize, Tognon’s men retained the same basic layout as the 650. They started with a tubular steel frame
that uses the same 26-degree head angle and 4.0 inches of trail as the alloy-framed 650. They then specified a 54.1-inch wheelbase, a fuel cell located under the seat and an airbox housed below the faux gas tank. The result is a compact, featherweight (claimed dry weight is less than 400 pounds) musclebike that has ample room for larger riders.
The Ghost provides handling that is taut and sharp, thanks largely to its Paioli 41mm inverted fork and single shock.
Though the fork is quite stiffly sprung, it is easily adjustable for compression and rebound damping and is very compliant. The shock is also fully adjustable, and it provides good ride quality with progressive, controlled response. The rear suspension handles large variations in road surfaces quite capably and puts down the 668cc engine’s claimed 70 horsepower really well, with just a hint of squat when you whack open the throttle.
The one fly in this Italian ointment is that the powerband is very peaky. Nothing at all
happens below 3000 rpm, and even below 4000 the Ghost isn’t friendly. You have to rev it hard all the time, even at slow speeds, which is completely out of character for the type of bike that the Ghost is trying to be.
But when the revs rise, the Ghost sure flies. To pass a slow-roller, kick the gearbox down three notches, gas it up and watch the tach needle zip around the dial-there’s a big rush of power at 5500 rpm.
To help counter the Ghost’s lack of midrange power, it would help to gear it down with a 44-tooth rear sprocket in place of the stock 42. This change would prevent you from having to use first gear so often in slow traffic.
There may, however, be an even simpler solution. One of the advantages of fuel injection is that you only need access to a programmer to make changes, and Tognon has promised to boost the Ghost’s midrange power before it goes into production. The bike is scheduled to be tested on the Weber/Marelli dyno shortly; it will almost certainly run better when it
emerges.
Alan Cathcart
