Unlike its much larger 1970s rivals Ducati or Moto Guzzi, Laverda was never a major standalone motorcycle manufacturer, with the Italian firm’s bike division always just a spin-off from its agri-machinery core business.
But thanks mainly to the passion of the late Massimo Laverda, who took over responsibility for Moto Laverda in 1964 at the tender age of 25, the family-owned firm produced a stream of high-performance models, of which its iconic 750SFC parallel-twin was both the most prestigious to own, and the most successful on the racetrack.
Just 549 examples were built during 1971-76, out of the 19,000 parallel-twin 650/750cc Laverdas manufactured before their early-1970s replacement by the 981cc triples, and later 500cc twins.
Laverda began life in 1873 manufacturing farming implements, wine-making machinery and the clocks surmounting the copious campanile belltowers that are a trademark feature of its Veneto home region’s landscape. In 1905, founder Pietro Laverda moved his workshop to Breganze, a little town outside Vicenza, where in the 1930s Laverda became one of Italy’s leading farm machinery makers.
But with the chronic need for personal transportation in post-Second World War Italy fuelling a booming market for small-capacity bikes, in 1949 this was joined by a separate motorcycle company founded by Pietro Laverda’s grandson, Francesco. He’d begun designing his own such motorcycle in 1947, assisted by one of the company’s engineers, Luciano Zen, featuring a girder-forked pressed steel frame housing Laverda’s own OHV 75cc four-stroke engine, with a fully
