One of the most polarizing motorcycles released at the 2019 EICMA show in Milan, the Bimota TesiH2 started impassioned conversations just by mentioning its name.
Maybe that doesn’t surprise us though, as the controversial motorcycle represents a crack in time for the Italian brand, as it is reborn with the green euros from Kawasaki Europe.
Pivotal moments in a motorcycle company’s history should be historic motorcycles in their own right, and it is hard to think how a supercharged two-wheeler with a hub-center steering chassis can’t burn its place into Bimota’s story.
If you can’t tell, I fall into the camp that loves this motorcycle (though, I will admit there aspects of the machine that I do not care for), but overall I love the audacity of the Bimota TesiH2 – and it is for this reason for which Kawasaki invested in the boutique Italian brand.
Risk & Reward
Out of the four Japanese motorcycle brands, Kawasaki is the risk-taker. Their styling, love it or hate it, is anything but boring and vanilla, and they dare to make motorcycles that no one else seems interested in creating. Take the H2R and Ninja ZX-25R as the most recent examples of this.
But even Kawasaki can only push the envelope so far, and that is where Bimota comes into play, and reaches a customer that Kawasaki can never dream of pursuing.
This allows Bimota to dream big, and to create machines that border just on the fringe of the absurd. A 228hp supercharged inline-four engine is absurd (especially when a trip to your local tuning house can make it easily a 300hp motor).
It is absurd to make a motorcycle that is dripping in carbon fiber and beautifully machined aluminum parts, which culminate in one of the whackiest front-ends ever conceived in the motorcycle industry.
The price tag that comes with the Bimota TesiH2 (though it hasn’t been released) is surely going to fall into the realm of absurdity as well.
And for all these reason, I love what was shown off at EICMA. The motorcycle industry needs more absurdity in its ranks. We need more bikes like the Bimota TesiH2.
For anyone that balks at what this tiny brand has created, I say that they have lost the right to complain the next time an uninspired motorcycle unveils at one of these trade shows, as the rest of the industry insists on taking a regression to the comfy middle we call boring.
Two Minds, One Body
Getting hands on with the Bimota TesiH2 is an experience, though it is clearly a motorcycle that is born out of the marriage of two very different parents.
The Bimota parts are what you would expect from the Italian name: precise, detailed, bold, and beautiful. It is easy to get lost in the folds and details of the carbon fiber bodywork, and marvel over the machined pieces of the hub-center steering chassis.
But then, there is the stark contrast of the OEM pieces from Kawasaki, which hit you like a cold shower and stick out like a sore thumb. Remember when I said that there were pieces about the Bimota that I didn’t care for?
There is a reason for this madness though, and it all has to do with the increased costs associated with making a road-legal motorcycle for world consumption.
All of the bits and bobs on the TesiH2 that bear a Kawasaki stamp are items that are under close regulation, and so to meet road-going standards, Bimota borrowed the exhaust, mirrors, fender, signals, and headlight from the Kawasaki Ninja H2.
For the most part, this is a triviality. Fenders, exhausts, signals, and even mirrors can easily be replaced with more attractive (and less legal) aftermarket ones.
Things like the dash and headlight will have to remain though, the latter being the biggest gripe I have with the TesiH2’s design, but it is a small bargain to pay for building a homologated machine in less than a year’s time.
Though Bimota and Kawasaki have been courting each other for roughly three years, the TesiH2 came together just in 2019. Helping the Bimota team leapfrog the design into production meant being smart about using components from the H2 project, especially when it came to electronics and homologation requirements.
I imagine this will be the case with Bimota’s future planned motorcycles as well, the next of which will be the Bimota KB4, which uses the 1,043cc four-cylinder engine from the Kawasaki Z1000 at its center.
Bimota plans to build 200 motorcycles in 2020, which is an ambitious goal for the boutique brand – that is nearly one a day, on a five-day work week.
Up-Close & Personal
Back to the machine itself, Bimota had on display a look at the Tesi front-end, which helps one to understand how the hub-center steering system works.
If you follow the linkages, you can see that the y-axis forces are transmitted aft to an Öhlins rear shock (with electronic semi-active bits), which sits side-by-side to another Swedish suspension piece, which acts on the double-sided rear swingarm.
Hub-center steering arrangements are an interesting thing in the two-wheeled space, primarily because for all their alleged benefits, they never seem to catch on.
There are several reasons for this, but the biggest has to do with change – a hub-center steering motorcycle doesn’t behave like a traditional motorcycle with telescopic forks.
This leads to riders complaining about vague front-end feelings, which is the result of two factors. One, separating out the front-end dive that comes with braking leads a rider unable to feel when the front suspension is under load during braking.
This makes it a challenge to understand what a tire is transmitting back to the rider, and right now that is the whole game when it comes to pushing the front-end of a motorcycle.
Additionally, because the braking forces are separate, the geometry of a hub-center steering motorcycle doesn’t change during hard deceleration, which means a slower turn-in rate when on the brakes.
This is a contrast to how telescopic forks compress on braking, as their compression on the fork springs means also that there is an overall change in rake angle of the front-end.
Having a number of linkages to make the steering work also adds a lack of feel to the handlebars (each linkage adding play and slop to the system’s movement), which we sometimes see remedied by an additional wishbone-styled brace that goes from the front axle to the rider’s hands (see: Vyrus 986 M2 Moto2).
Of course, having such a futuristic chassis means that you have to compliment with other items that show you are on the forefront of technical matters…I am of course alluding to the fact that the TesiH2 comes with carbon fiber winglets.
Bimota makes no mention of how functional the design is, though we would imagine they mimic the winglets found on the H2, and provide only a nominal amount of downforce.
That is interesting, because the long carbon fiber tube on the left-hand side of the motorcycle reminds us of the beastly superchager, which spins to over 100,000 rpm as it compressed the atmosphere into the engine’s four-cylinders.
Like I have said before, there is no shortage of details to enjoy on this motorcycle.
I suppose, it is up to you to decide if these details add up to more than their sum when you consider the whole motorcycle, as such, there is a bevy of hi-res photos for you to ogle in the gallery below. Enjoy!
Photos: © 2019 Jensen Beeler / Asphalt & Rubber – All Rights Reserved
Be sure to follow all of our 2019 EICMA show coverage this over the coming days, for the latest news and releases for the 2020 motorcycle model year.
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