Mvs In America

MVs IN AMERICA

Italian exotics worthy of their mystique

TO HEAR THE WAY MEMBERS OF THE motoring press spoke of the 1970s line of MV Agustas, we should all be excited at the return of the exotic Italian machines.

When moto-journalists got the rare opportunity to test an MV, they rarely spared the rapture, while trying to sidestep horrific list prices. In 1975, Honda’s CB750 listed for $2100; the MV 750S America stickered at $6000. But as Cycle magazine scribes pointed out in a 1973 test of the 750S and 750 GT, Agustas were not about numberseither in price tags or on performance charts. “After all the measurements have been taken, all the data collected, all the figures tabulated, motorcycles are an emotional experience...You need not be certified by your local psychiatrist to buy an MV Agusta. You will, however, need money.”

A basic understanding of Count Domenico’s company philosophy was also required. “You’ll need to know and care,” the ’73 article confided, “that MV manufactures helicopters for profit and races Grand Prix motorcycles for sport, that their 750 street engine is based on the 500 GP unit of the Fifties and early Sixties, that MV builds very few 750s and those just for fun, and that the real beauty of the MV lies in the engine.”

Oh, there was no mistaking the engineering in the MV powerplants. “All that money and effort has been spent on the basics: MV delivers a superb engine. The most sophisticated, complicated engine in motorcycling,” opined Cycle's editors. “Hardware junkies blow themselves away on MV engines. It is a masterpiece of precision castings, gears, needle bearings, ball bearings, shafts and all other things in the hard-goods department. Were it mass-produced, the engine would still be murderously expensive to build.”

And no one, not even jaded journalists, could get past the sound of an MV. “Above the 6000-rpm level, the growl from the organ-pipe exhaust breaks into that blood-boiling fireengine falsetto. Words can’t reach that sound; more than the MV’s squat looks, more than the sand-cast parts, more than the engine’s pedigree, that sound is the way the MV snaps you on its wavelength and mesmerizes your soul.”

Looking back on Agustas in the May, 1987, issue of Cycle, Editor Phil Schilling remarked, “Super-expensive and exclusive, the MVs were the loudest, most boisterous standard roadsters ever exposed to a decibel meter.” Need proof? The ’76 750S America tipped the sound-level scale at an ear-piercing 94 decibels, but Cycle's editors couldn’t get enough: “Staffers sampled the (optional) decibels-down mufflers for a half-hour, then reverted to the more standard-music mufflers.” The America, they said, “travelled in a mushroom cloud of sound.”

In 1987, Schilling claimed, “The later 750/850 America series were the most charismatic motorcycles ever built.” Twelve years earlier, Cycle had already summed it up: “If no MVs existed, motorcycling would have to invent them.” -Paul Seredynski