Officine Rossopuro is an Italian custom motorcycle garage with a long portfolio of stunningly beautiful bikes, this is their most recent offering and unlike many of their client-specified builds, this one is for sale.
The chap who runs Officine Rossopuro is the suitably Italianly-named Filippo Barbacane, he’s been in the business longer than most of us have been wearing long pants and his drug of choice is Moto Guzzi. The modified Moto Guzzi 1000SP you see here was built by Filippo as a catharsis of sorts, usually each bike he builds is the result of collaboration with a client and so he wanted to take the time to build a bike from scratch without having to ask opinions, compromise or go against his own aesthetic instincts.
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The Moto Guzzi 1000SP was released in 1977 as a fully-faired touring motorcycle designed to challenge bikes like the BMW R100RS, it had a large windscreen and full leg protection giving it a bit of a clunky appearance however it was very popular and the 948cc engine was capable of pulling the bike to speeds in excess of 200kph.
When Filippo rolled the 1000SP donor bike into his garage one of the first jobs was removing all of the bodywork, the fuel tank, windshield and fenders to have a good look at the bare frame and plan his build. He opted to hand form the seat, tank and rear cowling from aluminium to move away from the rigid lines that were popular in the late-70s and early-80s, he also removed the clunky instrument cluster and replaced it with a simple, single one-dial gauge.
When it came time to paint, a shade of green from the Moto Guzzi back catalogue was selected to stay true to the marques identity and when it came time to name the bike, Filippo went with ‘Eroica’ (meaning ‘heroic’) as a tribute to the great men from the formative days of motorcycling who would ride at great speeds with their face tucked in behind the speedo and their legs stretched out behind them.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this bike is now for sale. If you’d like to enquire after it you can contact Filippo here.
Via Officine Rossopuro with additional information provided by Bike EXIF.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
