"Stop detuning our naked sportsbikes," cried the hooligans. "OK," grinned MV Agusta, and let this brutal Brutale off the leash. How exactly you're supposed to hold onto this unfaired monster with the wind blasting your puny body at two and a half times the speed of a hurricane? Well, that's your problem.
One of the things I've always enjoyed most about nakedbikes is their ability to make slow feel fast, and fast feel faster. The lack of a fairing makes it a genuine feat of strength to hold on and keep attacking if you spend any amount of time over 120 mph (~200km/h), where such speeds are a bit of a doddle on a sportsbike.
By 160 mph (~260 km/h), the wind is battering you relentlessly. Your head is helplessly bobbing from side to side in the furiously fluctuating pressure zones around your helmet, which is pushing back so hard that your neck is straining and your nose is pressing up against your visor. This is with your whole body crouched down over the tank, too. The very thought of popping your chest up into the windstream is an invitation for the bike to go on without you.
It's a glorious and wild and elemental and testing experience, and it's around about as fast as I've been without the cheat code of sporty fairings.
Not because I didn't want to go faster, mind you, but because most nakedbikes simply can't go any faster with me on them. It's linear horsepower against exponential drag. The poor, shrieking motor is faithfully giving all it's got as you fly into the future, willing the number on your speedo to creep up just one or two more with your pupils the size of smarties and your fingers straining to keep their grip on the bars.
I don't blame the bikes – this isn't what they're built for. With the prodigious power of the modern engine, they're already quite literally going faster than they would if you dropped them out of an aeroplane. And that would be fast enough for most people.
Not the speed-twisted perverts at MV Agusta. Buried in an avalanche of motorcycle news from EICMA 2018, you might have missed the new Brutale 1000 Serie Oro.
Like everything MV makes (well, everything this side of the Turismo Veloce, perhaps), it's a glass-case beauty to behold. Like none of MV's other current Brutale naked models, it uses the 998cc inline 4-cylinder motor from the outgoing F4, which, you'll remember, has just been eulogized as one of the great bike designs of all time with the F4 Claudio final edition.
Horsepower from this screaming work of art: 208 at 13,450rpm, or 212 if you pop the right exhaust on. Not just a little more than the rampant KTM 1290 Super Duke and aggressive Aprilia Tuono 1100, around 30 horses more. Torque peaks at 9,300 rpm with 115 Nm, or 85 pound-feet.
In terms of equipment, it's all there: electronic semi-active Ohlins bouncy bits to stick you to the road, Brembo's fancy Stylema brakes to pull you up, bidirectional quickshifter, traction control, wheelie control, torque control, ride-by-wire and a flashy 5-inch color dash. The ABS system isn't lean angle-sensitive, but it is clever enough to keep the rear wheel down if you mash the front lever and pray. Dry weight is a decent 186 kg, or 410 pounds.
MV claims it's created a 302 km/h (187 mph) nakedbike here. That is a prodigious and laudable claim, and despite the two small wings either side of the radiator, it's much nakeder than you might expect for a bike designed to achieve such goals.
What does it cost? What does it matter? MV will only make 300 of them, and they're likely already sold. It's more important to know this beast is out there, and hope that somebody among us gets to test themselves against the fury of the wind. Hopefully whichever maniac manages to top this thing out returns from the top of the mountain with a tale to tell, because I'd love to know what it's like at the next level.
Check out a video below.
Source: MV Agusta
