Bimota has a whole new design for its wacky hub-steered front end, nearly doubling the steering range, and it's celebrating this achievement with one of the strangest production motorcycles of the year: a 200-horsepower supercharged adventure bike.
Quietly unveiled at EICMA in Milan earlier this month, where Bimota had a small section within parent company Kawasaki's exhibit, the Bimota Tera debuts a remarkable new height-adjustable double-swingarm chassis, which the company has been working on for several years.
It's a much lighter and visually less obtrusive interpretation of the center-hub steering concept Bimota has made famous, most recently in its hideous Tesi H2 superbike. The Tesi H2 shares the Tera's engine – the supercharged 1,000cc engine from Kawasaki's H2 cruise missile – but while it also runs a swingarm at each end, the steering system is completely different. Take a look:
Where the Tesi H2 handles steering via rods and linkages going horzintally back from the front wheel then back up under the bodywork to the handlebars, the Tera chassis gets it done much more directly. A steering linkage comes straight down from the steering head to grab and turn the hub, with brake calipers attached and a pair of knee joints above the wheel to soak up travel as the suspension moves up and down.
Speaking of suspension, it's fully-adjustable, nitrogen-charged Ohlins TTX 36 gear. But – and we may be wrong here – it seems like both the Tera's shocks are in front of the rear wheel, with the front shock being connected to the front swingarm via a linkage running under the engine – which incidentally is the only direct connection between the front and rear parts of the chassis; the engine itself is the central structure of the bike.
It's a bizarre-looking setup, but it reduces unsprung mass, increases suspension travel up to 145 and 165 mm (5.7 and 6.5 inches) at the front and rear end, respectively (that's with the optional semi-active Marzocchi suspension), gives you all the steering/braking/suspension separation benefits of a hub-steered bike and helps keep the wheelbase down to 1,445 mm (56.9 in) – nearly six inches shorter than the Multistrada V4 RS, as Cycle World points out.
It also nearly doubles the side-to-side steering lock available, going from a measly 19 degrees in the Tesi H2 to 35 degrees in the Tera. That's still fairly narrow compared to the telescopic fork world, but it's a big step forward for Bimota's hub-steered designs.
And the Tera chassis has one other trick up its sleeve: the bike's ride height can be adjusted by as much as 30 mm (1.2 in). That could come in handy, since adventure machines can get so tall they're out of reach for shorter riders. The Tera's seat height as standard is 820 mm (32.3 in), but we're not sure what the minimum height is.
Other than that, well, it's an adventure tourer – albeit certainly one better suited to the road than the dirt, if my recollection of that wild and wicked engine is anything to go by. Kawasaki supplies all the electronics you'd expect, there's a 22-liter (5.81-gal) tank, there's hard luggage options – extravagantly lined, naturally – and a dirty big screen.
There's also a center stand, which kinda blows my mind on a bike that's both hub-steered and supercharged. Yeah, this is your practical hub-steered, supercharged Italian exotic, the one you can work on in the shed.
Bimota hasn't yet released pricing or availability information, but look; the Tesi H2 costs somewhere around US$72,000, and this bike's newer and fancier. So if you see somebody banging one of these around a rutted-out fire trail, stay close; you may well be looking at somebody that's about to throw a nice house deposit on its side.
Source: Bimota
