#bill lomas

“It was years ahead of its time, and it was so bloody fast – faster than anything else around back then! But it needed to be set up carefully for each rider.

“People used to say it didn’t handle very well, but that’s not true, as I proved when I had that battle with Geoff [Duke] at Solitude. You needed to pay a lot of attention to setting up the leading link forks for the rider’s weight, and how you sat on the bike, but the engine was just out of this world – there was no power curve as such, it just went all the way from low down in a straight line to 16,000 revs if you wanted to, though we kept it down to 12,500 just to be on the safe side.

“If Moto Guzzi had kept going after 1957, things would have been very different, I promise you. In the 1960s Honda would have had to build something better than their four, and the MV triple would have struggled against the V8, no question.