ENDURING ICON!
“ENDURANCE RACING THEN WAS ABOUT GETTING COMFORTABLE FOR A LONG SPELL AND CONSERVING YOUR ENERGY. SO, THE PLUSHLY-PADDED SEAT ON THE LAVERDA WAS YOUR THRONE FOR THE LONG-HAUL!”
It’s a pity in a way that Massimo Laverda and Soichiro Honda never met each other before they both sadly passed away, because even through interpreters they’d have discovered a common passion for high-quality four-stroke engineering, and for going racing with the result.
Moreover, although their respective companies were vastly different in size and scale, they also possessed a shared commitment to forging their own path technically, and to producing stylistically appealing models, replete with technical innovation.
This was especially true 50 years ago, when the evolution of what we think of today as a modern motorcycle, had only just begun gathering pace. Honda had commenced its own march up the capacity scale with the CB450 DOHC parallel-twin launched in 1964, the year that Massimo Laverda was appointed by his father Francesco to take over running the motorcycle division of his family’s agrimachinery company. Massimo’s understanding of the marketplace due to his own passion for bikes – he was already a Vincent and BMW R69S owner – meant Moto Laverda was the first-ever manufacturer to produce a 750cc sportbike.
That came about in May 1968, when production began of the scaled-up version of the 650cc five-speed SOHC wet sump parallel-twin that it had unveiled in prototype form in November 1966 at London’s Earls Court Show.
It didn’t take long for other manufacturers to follow suit, most promptly Britain’s BSA/ Triumph combo which launched its 750cc Trident/Rocket-3 triples in September 1968, albeit powered by a four-speed vertically-split OHV push-rod motor concocted byTriumph engineer Doug Hele, essentially by dint of adding an extra cylinder to his company’s bestselling 500 twin, whose kick-start it retained.
But in November 1968 Honda unveiled the electric-start SOHC four-cylinder CB750 at the Tokyo Show, and the rules of the motorcycle marketplace were changed forever.
There’s no mistaking the bright orange 1975 Laverda 3C 1000 endurance racer: Alan Cathcart rode it.
But just as he’d trumped Honda’s 450cc ‘Black Bomber’ twin with a 650cc model clearly derived visually from that bike’s 305cc CB77 sister, Massimo Laverda was already working on his counter to the CB750, as the first person to realise that 1000cc would be the two-wheeled capacity benchmark in the future.
With his company’s twin-cylinder models selling as
