Moto Guzzi V-11 Café Sport

Not YourStandard Italian Fare

When charging through the spaghetti-strand switchbacks of the Georgia mountains, it's easy to succumb to the allure of Italian cooking – Guzzi style.

For 2004, the Moto Guzzi kitchen has revamped the menu and added some steamy new items. They're rolling out a sporting standard edition of its popular V11 Sport model and offering it in two guises. The basic model is the V11 Sport Ballabio, named for the small northern Italian town that hosts the famed Ballabio-Resinelli hill-climb competition. But for this test, Moto Guzzi North America provided us with a V11 Café Sport, the more massaged model of the sport standard. The Café Sport features Öhlins suspension pieces, steel-braided lines and stylish carbon fiber bits sprinkled about.

As far as looks go, this latest Italian marque offering elicits a first response typical of exotic machines: i.e., "Wow! This thing is drop-dead gorgeous." Bronze gold paint covers the tank, the tail section and steering-head mounted bullet fairing. The classic Moto Guzzi transverse mounted 1064cc engine thrusts out from the undersides of the fuel tank with steel exhaust pipes snaking back to a pair of brush-finish black muffler cans. A gold anodized handlebar (plucked from Mama Aprilia's Tuono parts bin) sits atop the gold upside-down Öhlins fork. Carbon fiber units cover the front wheel, starter motor and side panels....

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