Rimini-born Vyrus virtuoso Ascanio Rodorigo has lived
and worked all his life in the motorcycling hotbed of the
Riviera Adriatica, beginning as a 20-year old wrench for
the local Bimota factory race team in 1973 under the
aegis of his idol, Massimo Tamburini. After Tamburini's
departure, Bimota suffered one of its periodic financial
crises and stopped racing, although Tamburini's
replacement, Federico Martini, soon righted matters
commercially by creating the firm's best-selling debut
Ducati-powered bike, the DB1. After a spell on the
production line building customer bikes, Rodorigo was,
ironically, long gone by the time Martini built the
first-ever Honda V4-powered Tesi prototype in 1985, a
hub-center design which was the Mech.E thesis (hence the
name) of his young assistant fresh out of university,
Pierluigi Marconi.
"I learned a lot building customer bikes for Bimota,
but it was so repetitive I had to leave before I got
bored," admits Rodorigo, who on January 1, 1985 opened
his own company under the ARP name on the other side of
Rimini, a small but soon well-regarded workshop producing
special parts for race or road, as well as a variety of
special sportbike frames. "My passion has always been to
build prototypes and one-off concepts," says the
machine-room Picasso, who also became recognized as the
man to visit if you had an unusual bike, and especially a
racer, that needed work done. "Our team at ARP was very
adaptable and could work very fast in making one-off
parts or complete bikes. We were like a mouse compared to
the elephant that bigger companies' development
departments were, by comparison. I worked on quite a few
Tesis, and we were always having problems with them which
seemed impossible to resolve. But I had an Australian
friend, Matthew Casey, who worked for Bimota in the
1990s, and he has four of them! He was always telling me
to make a Tesi the way I wanted to-`It's your kind of
motorcycle-just go and do it!' he kept telling me. So,
eventually, in September 2002, I decided to do so."
Ascanio Rodorigo and his Vyrus 985
ARP already had some pretty effective after-hours
helpers, not least Dervis Macrelli, the frame-making
wizard who's worked with Tamburini putting his ideas into
metal ever since the early Bimota days, and who got into
the habit of stopping by ARP after clocking off at CRC (Cagiva
Research Center) to help create what became known as the
Vyrus. Where'd that somewhat, er, negative-sounding name
come from, then? "When considering how the first
prototype should be, we decided to build a bike to
display at the Padova Show the following January, which
is the Mecca for anyone doing something special on two
wheels in Italy," explains Rodorigo. "It was a real
challenge that meant we worked day and night for three
months. One night at 3 a.m., I was washing my hands free
of powder after working on the body styling-we didn't
have 3D computer modeling, we did everything by hand
according to a rough drawing, just by eye. My friend
Mauro working with me was a builder during the day, and
he kept trying to persuade me to go to bed-so he could
too, I guess! But I wanted to get the body finished-then
when we'd done so I suddenly realized we hadn't got a
name for the bike. We couldn't call it Tesi, because that
was Bimota's name-but then Mauro told me, we must call it
Vyrus, but with a `y' not an `i', because this is not
like the one before, a virus that is in every computer
and maybe in us, too, to be so crazy working here at 3
a.m. to build a motorcycle. So, that's when ARP became
Vyrus."
That first Vyrus 984 duly made its debut at the Padova
Show in January 2003, powered by a tuned Ducati 900SS
desmodue motor of the kind ARP had been racing with
success in SuperTwins events-hence the model designation,
which was the cubic capacity of the engine. "We knew this
engine very well from racing it, so it had no secrets
from us," states Rodorigo. "If we were to concentrate on
trying to make this high-tech chassis design work
properly, we had to not worry at all about the engine, so
that's why we chose the desmodue. It was a known quantity."
But the proprietor of the new Vyrus company admits to
being completely unprepared for the rapturous reception
his new bike received. "We had literally hundreds of
inquiries to make production versions of our prototype,
which we were quite unprepared to do," he says. "But I
realized we had now to turn the prototype into a customer
version we could manufacture in series in small batches,
always by hand, but in some kind of volume. We had to get
the bike homologated first, though, which in fact was a
fascinating experience I enjoyed very much, producing the
lightest twin-cylinder sportbike in the marketplace,
though always completely street-legal-but finally we
succeeded."
Alan Cathcart on the Vyrus at Barber Motorsports Park
After an intensive development process on the
racetrack, during which the Vyrus 984 Pro Twins racer
became a regular visitor to the rostrum in European
twin-cylinder racing in the hands of Gianluca Villa,
nephew of the late four-time world champion Walter, the
first fully homologated Vyrus streetbike met its happy
customer in January 2003. Since then, a total of 70 such
bikes have been constructed, 25 of them marketed in a
neat squaring of the circle under the Tesi 2D tag by the
born-again Bimota company through their dealers around
the world-including two bikes sold in Russia, and 10 to
Japan. With production up and running of this desmodue
version, delivering 77 bhp in a bike weighing 339 pounds
in street-legal form, Rodorigo turned his attention to a
Superbike version powered by Ducati's 104mm-bore 999cc
Testastretta motor, to create a modern version of the
original Tesi which inspired the whole design. After a
strung-out development path beginning back in 2004 ("We
are only five people, and demand for the 984 is so
constant, we couldn't spare the time to pay attention to
the new bike," he shrugs), the first 985 appeared at the
start of this year, and was promptly sold-to Russia!
Since then, two more 4V bikes have been built, of which
the test machine was the first Vyrus to cross the
Atlantic to head up a U.S. sales drive.
The dramatic modernist styling of the Vyrus 985 is the
work of Rodorigo himself, with close help from ex-Ducati
designer Sam Matthews, formerly Pierre Terblanche's
right-hand man, but now working for Citroen in Paris. "We
did this at long distance, with Sam making CAD drawings
and me interpreting them into a full-size clay model,
then e-mailing him photos of the result," says Rodorigo.
A copy of the finished article can be yours in the color
of your choice 60 days after placing an order for 54,750
Euro (about $67,750) inclusive of tax in Italy, with full
EU homologation. A fully-faired option will be available
later this year, at additional cost.-MC
