Story and photography by Clement Salvadori.

Not many Americans have heard of Bimota motorcycles, and few were sold here, the price of this Italian exotica having something to do with it. The company would buy reputable engines and then build a new chassis around them. SB6-R means that this model was the 6th Bimota to be powered by a Suzuki engine, in this case the GSX-R1100. And the R apparently stood for Race, while in truth this model was only a minor upgrade on the previous SB6. What Bimota did was to make a much better handling machine, as well as diminish the weight. That stock GSX-R weighed in at 509 pounds dry, while the Bimota version weighed 418 pounds dry ? quite a difference.

When and where did all this begin" In 1973 in the seaside town of Rimini. After a fellow named Massimo Tamburini crashed his Honda CB750 on the nearby Misano racetrack and broke a few bones. While he was recuperating he thought a lot about the crash and attributed it to a poorly designed chassis. This was the 1970s when the Japanese were building increasingly powerful bikes that went well in a straight line, but their handling was not terribly good when trying to get a knee down in a curve.
Tamburini and a couple of friends, Valerio Bianchi and Giuseppe Morri, had a shop that built commercial air-conditioning ducts, so they had good knowledge of how metal worked. As a sideline they decided to build better frames and suspension for existing motorcycle engines and in 1973 in...