In early 1994 a really immaculate 750SF turned up outside the local dealer. The insane grin on my face as I did a highly illegal U-turn in the Ford Orion to get a closer look must've given me away to the owner who was about to roar off. I was allowed to swing a leg over the beast with the engine thrumming away beneath me (it was too emotive an experience to call ticking over) and blip the throttle.
It turned out that the owner's wife had just dropped a couple of brats and she was becoming increasingly frantic about him acquiring a car. Er, would I swap the Onion (valued at £3000) for the Laverda? Let’s do it! I followed him to his house, loaded a couple of boxes of spares into the car, picked up his documents, then he followed me to my house where | gave him the Ford’s docs and drove him home, then took a taxi back, as neither of us was insured for the other vehicle.
The wife was highly amused, when she came back from work, to find a 6000 mile (it'd been stored for 20 years) Laverda in front of the house instead of the car. It took her a week to speak to me again, then only after I'd bought a rat Fiesta as penance. The fact that I was walking around with a big grin, humming away happily to myself didn’t exactly help domestic matters.
The Laverda wasn't exactly easy to get a handle on, either, in many ways like a beautiful woman who knows exactly how attractive she is. To get anywhere fast you have to fall in love straight off and plunge in regardless. The controls were as heavy going as a domestic dispute but that big vertical twin motor flooded the world with the kind of torque that swept all before it. The steering was also heavy but remarkably precise and controlled.
The suspension was as compliant as a whore after you'd run out of money and required the kind of stiff upper lip that only an Englishman could muster. The whole somehow came together like a night with a hot nubile, and once experienced wasn't at all easy to give up. The wife practically had to bungee me to the chair for one of her interminable dinner parties where my incoherent muttering about the joys of motorcycling in general and the SF in particular (which by then had pride of place in the hallway) went down as well my cousin relating his South African adventures, which seemed to involve an ton of sex with young girls.
It was after one such bash that I'd gone for a midnight blast to clear out the cobwebs. There’s nothing quite like riding a real motorcycle through the dark night, the bellowing boom of the engine, the flowing power that energizes the whole body, the piercing glow of the big chrome headlight... aargh, where's the road gone?
When the front light went out I thought I was going to die as the line of the road disappeared from my view. Stop screaming, I told myself, this is a test of your character. I'd simultaneously hit the brakes and the dip switch but everything seemed to happen very slowly in relation to the rate at which the road was skimming by under the alloy wheels. Dip beam glowed briefly then exploded into searchlight intensity before blowing out. There was enough time and light to see where I was going and to lose more speed.
Coming to a halt, all that was left of the lighting system was pilot beam and the brake light. I pottered home at the kind of pace that would have even moped owners screaming abuse but the roads were as deserted as a Russian nuclear power station about to melt down. My luck was in, there was just a wire from the generator that had come loose. The Bosch electrics were better than the dodgy Wop stuff but still not quite up to the highest standards of the day even back then.
The gleaming paint and alloy, though, were always a pleasure to polish, even if the rear chain needed constant oiling to keep it in shape and covered the back in grime after each and every ride (the chains last about 5000 miles). The transmission seemed the one area of weakness, given that the primary vibes didn’t unduly disturb and were, at least below 7000 revs, taken merely as a sign that the OHC mill was working away. The gear change action had some of the roughness of a BMW boxer and some of vagueness of an old Honda box (perhaps inspired by the engine’s passing resemblance to a sixties CB72), took me a couple of months before I could fearlessly charge through the ratios without worrying over tangling the four valves.
Another sign of the era in which the SF was conceived was the need for constant valve, carb and oil attention every 1000 miles. A bit tedious after becoming used to modern Japs that can be ignored for five times that distance, although the engine was both simple and easy to work on. Failure to do that maintenance left the gearbox almost as impossible as the wife two days before her period and resulted in an increase in vibes that kept the mirrors constantly blurred and left my feet aching with the buzz.
The open road was the Lav's natural habitat, revelling in long sweeping curves and 80 to 90mph cruising. Top speed was around 120mph but the vibes meant that it was only possible to loiter at such a velocity for a few moments. At the top end of the rev range, the direct mounting on the engine below the backbone frame meant that the shakes erupted through all points of contact with the machine, including my knees which had to relax their grip on the tank or be shattered by the violent thrumming. 80 to 90mph, though, was acceptably smooth with just my feet suffering from those big pistons loping up and down together through the combustion process.
Town riding was a serious business needing both a lot of concentration and muscle. The loose transmission complained, the engine growled in protest, the controls went leaden and the steering felt incredibly listless. The whole machine demanded a large dose of throttle and an open road, but if I persisted in the unnatural, if not insulting, role of commuter (as I had to as it was my only bike) then the clutch started dragging, the plugs oiled up and the carbs would spew out petrol! I've never come across another machine that was so determined to be ridden rapidly.
A sign of its dislike of town riding, my swollen wrists and blown mind apart, was that fuel went down to 35-40mpg instead of the 45-50mpg I could more normally expect if I used the machine in the way the manufacturer had intended. Pirelli tyres lasted over 10000 miles and I've yet to wear out the disc pads with over 16000 miles on the clock, although the front disc and rear drum were rather wooden.
The brakes were hard pushed to take the madness of country road racing and the slight top heavy feel of the chassis in the tighter corners was about as welcome as an AIDS victim at an orgy. The taut suspension nearly always kept the wheels on the required line but meant that, over really rough and neglected surfaces, my spine took the kind of battering that would make a sado-masochist come in his pants.
The firmness of my grip on the bars turned me into a knuckle cruncher in the handshake game and my fast expanding arm muscles would have given me an edge if I ever wanted to take up tennis. The SF really needs six months of practice before it begins to make any kind of sense, especially if the previous bike was a sophisticated Jap. The more you put in, though, the better the experience becomes. It can’t be that bad as I use if for the daily commute of five miles of city traffic each way, have done 500 miles in a day and 3000 miles in a week, as well as 160 miles in under two hours! I did have the seat rebuilt with proper foam, though!
Laverda 750s are as rare as they are expensive. Few have been scrapped as the engine’s capable of going around the clock (look out for, in this order, primary chain, camchain, gearbox, valves and pistons whilst the electrics can go at any time). Now that I’m used to the beast I feel there’s at least a decade’s worth of hard riding to do before I need think about a replacement.
Barry Summers