And How! Moto Guzzi’s Remarkable V8

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It is Brandes Elitch’s best loved motorcycle. “This is my absolute favorite bike and my vote for the most desirable bike ever made.” It captivated Graham Gauld at this year’s Monaco Historics. It even lit a fire under the Editorial bum. Find out why. Ed.

Story by Graham Gauld

For a reason I never completely understood, the Monaco Club invited a bunch of people with vintage racing bikes to drive round the circuit and wave to the crowd. But one bike, a Moto Guzzi of 1957, caught my eye. The Moto Guzzi was a 500cc V8 twin cam with water cooling and 8 Del Orto carburetors. The bike had a full nose and body cowling so you could not actually see the engine so I spoke to one of my pals who was a scrutineer at Monaco. He talked to the owner and persuaded him to take the cowl off and he took this photo of the engine. It was a little gem. The bike that came to Monaco was from a private collection. Says Elitch, “There were 2 Guzzi V-8’s. I saw one at the factory museum at Mandello del Lario, and saw one at Retromobile, and the Solvang Museum in California has a perfect replica.”

The concept of a V8 engine in a motor cycle was not new, as roughly twenty years before, in 1938, Plinio Galbusera (Moto Galbusera & Co) from Brescia surprised everyone at the Milan Show by showing not just a 249cc V4 two-stroke but a mighty 498cc V8 two-stroke which was in fact two of his V4 blocks bolted to each end of the gearbox and supercharged! According to information on Wiki, Plinio Galbusera and engineer Adolf Marama Toyo initially built 173 to 498 cc Python (Rudge-Whitworth) – and Sturmey-Archer engines into their frames, but in 1938 they made two larger models. One was a 249.2 cc four-two with compressor; the other had a 498.4 cc eight-cylinder engine built from two coupled four blocks. It also had a compressor.

However, the Guzzi engine of 1955 was completely different. It was water-cooled, had twin overhead camshafts and in terms of horsepower put rivals Gilera and MV in the shade. It was a tremendous technical achievement but like other ground-breaking competition engines throughout history, was dogged by mechanical problems due to the forward-thinking nature of the design.

Designed by Giulio Carcano and Enrico Canconi it produced 80 bhp at the crankshaft at an astonishing 12,000 rpm. When it came to carburation Del Orto came up with a manifold holding eight separate carburetors, one for each cylinder, and the whole design was a masterpiece of engineering ingenuity.

For example, the black tube you see in the color photo of the engine is in fact the top tube of the frame which also acted as the oil reservoir. It was also light, with a magnesium crankcase and it only weighed 45 kilos. As for pace, well one of them was timed at the Belgian motorcycle grand prix at 178 mph – in 1957.

Indeed, the engine was technically far more advanced that most of the automobile Grand Prix engines floating around at the time; let’s think of something similar. What else runs a bore of less than 2 inches? The closest in the would be the 1950 1500 cc V16 BRM with a bore 1.95 in (49.53 mm) and stroke of 1.90 in (48.26 m). And cut that in half to a V8 configuration, you still have 750cc. And apparently, in the high pitched creative as hell cycle world, no one since has attempted to create a 500 cc DOHC V8, aside from recreations of the Guzzi 8.

But, it was unreliable and eventually even the riders felt it was a bit dangerous. By 1957 GP motorcycle racing was getting too expensive, and most of the major players from Italy, Great Britain and Germany dropped out of the series. This included Moto Guzzi and the remarkable little V-8 disappeared.