Bimota is an Italian manufacturer of motorcycles. Valerio Bianchi, Guiseppe Morri and Massimo Tamburini founded Bimota in 1973. The manufacturer gained its name from the first two letters of the surnames of its three founders. Bimota is located in Rimini and it is best known for building custom motorcycles around existing engines and customizing other brands such as Suzuki.

Notable Bimota Motorcycles

In the early days Bimota concentrated entirely on using engines produced by other manufacturers and building bodies around them. To this end, they named their models after the engines involved so a BB1 would have a BMW engine and a KB1 would have a Kawasaki engine and so on. Their modern models include DB5, DB6, DB7, DB9 and the Tesi with each of these housing a Ducati engine. The Tesi 3D was co-designed with Vyrus and may be the only bike in production to feature Hub Steering.

Bimota & Racing Success

Bimota's first great racing success story came in 1980. Jon Ekerold raced as a privateer in the 350cc world championship on a Bimota powered by a Yamaha engine. They went on to do well in some of the earlier races of the Superbike World Championship such as when Virginio Ferrari placed first in the 1987 Formula TT riding a YB4 EI. David Tardozzi also won 5 races during the 1988 inaugural world superbike championship though he would only place third overall due to an inconsistent performance. More than a decade would pass without notable success until Anthony Gobert caused a major upset in 2000 when he won a wet race at Philip Island while riding a Bimota SB8R. In 2014 the Alstare team attempted to enter into World Superbikes with a Bimota package but since the bike failed to pass the competition's homologation rules the riders could not compete until round 2 and were unable to earn any points.

Bimota Today

Bimota suffered from a run of bad luck at the end of the 20th century and was forced to file for bankruptcy. However, in 2003 a new group of investors purchased the Bimota name and the company was restarted though it has yet to earn any major racing successes.