For this issue I have asked that Mr. Editor Ulrich list my name in the masthead and byline as Sam Quarelli Fleming. It is a tribute to my Italian grandmother, who is dead, so it won't make much difference, but it fits with the Italian theme. The SP is a limited production motorcycle of 150 that are designed to be a racing version of the RSV Mille. The bike is designed for racing although Aprilia has thrown in some exclusivity details to sell the bike to collectors as well. Each bike is numbered on the triple tree and Aprilia promises that if they build any more bikes to this specification that they will be called something else (apparently they already have a name picked out). I am not inured to the appeal of special limited edition industrial products but I have to say that it seems a little weird to race (aka destroy) a collectors item.

People buy street bikes for all sorts of reasons and purposes: style, comfort, fetishism, exclusivity, wheelies, etc. Ostensibly, people buy race bikes for only one reason: winning races. The unkind might ask at this juncture why AOD purchased YZF 600s for a few years but that is a different story.

This bike is street legal in some parts of the world, but not the US. Thus only a few racers will be able to buy them and even then, below the top level, it is not practical to race exotica. One can't buy another set of wheels, forks and a set of bodywork by mail-order the Monday after you crash the bike and have everything ready for the GNF two weeks later. And, most of these bikes are already spoken for.

So if Aprilia isn't trying to sell the RSV Mille SP in the US, why did they spend thousands of dollars to have me review it?

Aprilia is, by sales, volume and market presence, a scooter company. Walking the streets of any Italian city, or reviewing Aprilia's balance sheet, quickly reveals that there is a fortune to be made selling these vehicles. Italian streets are, by in large, narrow. Parking is slim to none, traffic is dense and the Italians are in a hurry to get where they are going. The lowly scooter, which looks slow and small in an American city, looks nimble and quick in the Italian counterpart.

And everyone rides them. And they ride them fast. And they pass other traffic on the sidewalks, in the gutters, down the centerline, on the inside of corners and on the outside. There is no pass that is so daring that it is not worth attempting. And these are not just 18 boys. They are 45 year old women in short professional dresses, they are old men, they are young girls. Everyone. It's like Italian traffic is a crowded paddock and everyone is tearing around on pit bikes.

And Aprilia sells a lot of them.

Enough to earn fat profits and finance GP and Superbike teams on specially engineered equipment which generate victories, which confers on Aprilia romance and image, which gives Aprilia distinction in the market place, which sells more scooters. Especially with a Rossi or, to a lesser extent, a Biaggi on board. And the average person on the street not only knows who Valentino Rossi is, they have a extensive list of reasons why they like him more than Biaggi.

I thought that "win on Sunday, sell on Monday stuff" was just a line we used to try to excise free junk for our race teams but Aprilia is using it to create an international brand name.

And now Aprilia is trying to leverage the same business plan into the US which, still surfing the crest of an eight year economic expansion, is literally awash is cash. When one talks to Aprilia PR folks they talk about trying to make the Aprilia scooter appeal to young professional, college girls and other folks who have never considered owning a motorized two wheeled vehicle. They talk about fashion and trends.

It is my personal feeling that they may have misjudged the US market. Scooters are great in an environment without traffic enforcement (ie, lots of lane splitting and sidewalk parking). American authorities would not stand for it.

On the other hand, Honda made a fortune selling step-throughs (and actually, still does) and sold many of them to people who had never considered purchasing a motorcycle either.

This is all a round about way to explain that I think Aprilia invited me to come ride their bike as part of a long term plan of raising the US visibility of the Aprilia name and associating it with things exotic, fast and beautiful.

As well as the fact that this motorcycle is not meant for racing below the AMA Superbike level in the US. Zero Gravity, Muzzy and whoever else covets the Aprilia racing franchise in the US will obviously not care about a review I write of this motorcycle, nor should they. I certainly would not be able to determine how competitive the bike is after 24 laps of a foreign track for a plethora of reasons. But, for a factory team, it doesn't ultimately matter if the bike can win or not since the team would be financed through sponsorship which, although more lucrative for winners, is available for factory sponsored participants.

And, last of all, the bike is priced at 30,000 Euro which, at today's exchange rates, is about $28,000 US.

But to make me feel like I am performing a somewhat useful task here, let's all suspend our powers of disbelief and pretend that this bike is available everywhere, enough street guys have bought and crashed them so that a plethora of spares is only a phone call away and that Aprilia is paying $1,000 a win in heavyweight twins, 750 superstock and heavyweight endurance.

Ulrich is paying me for this on a flat rate so my original plan was to dodge the responsibility of writing about the technical details of the SP since Mr. Ulrich wrote a somewhat rambling but very detailed report of the Mille in the September 1998 issue of RW. (Which, for your convenience, we have loaded onto the website at: http://www.roadracingworld.com/issues/Sept98/aprilia.htm don't say we don't make it easy for you. And the URL is correct just type carefully.) Imagine my dismay when I was informed that aside from basic design theory there is not much in common between the Mille and the Mille SP.

One has to understand the basic philosophy of Aprilia before one can appreciate Aprilia as a whole. In business the distinction between contractors and employees gets very vague. Aprilia openly recognizes and publicizes this fact. Whereas a BMW owner might be appalled to find that his Teutonic badged Funduro has a Rotax built motor and is assembled by Aprilia, Aprilia touts their extensive use of suppliers and contractors as a company strength. A company mantra is that it is hard for one company to be the best at all forms of engineering, design and production (composites, casting, plating, suspension, thermodynamics) it makes sense to simply hire the experts in each of these disciplines. This also allows for rapid changes of product lines, reduces company inertia which can otherwise keep a company committed to a particular design and, presumably, helps Aprilia avoid some of the onerous laws governing employment in Italy by keeping a smaller workforce.

The SP looks like the Mille down to the ugly stock muffler ("We know it's ugly"-Project Manager Andrea Soriani) and homely headlight ("Si, we know"-Soriani), which looks much better with the white number plate design than on the more basic Mille. The SP shares many of the exterior dimensions (bodywork, engine etc) but the actual components have all been upgraded or redesigned for racing.

Aprilia called in Ohlins to design the suspension (including the steering damper) for the SP replacing the Showa forks and Sachs-Boge shock that arrive with the Mille. I haven't ridden a Mille but the Showa and Sachs combination on the Aprilia RS 250 felt more than adequate for racing at Road Atlanta although I have heard complaints about the front end on the Mille lacking feel. Ohlins valved the suspension for a single rider for high traction track use and applied the de riguer titanium nitride coating to all external sliding shafts. European racetracks are, on the whole, much smoother, grippier and safer that US track. In the pits the suspension on the SP felt like it would be hopelessly stiff with barely any sag and lots of compression damping. On the track it worked well because there were only two bumps on the whole track. Quite a change after a weekend at IRP.

Carbon bodywork, fenders and chain guard. Although not carbon, the stock toe guard for the rear sprocket is a welcome detail. The tank is aluminum. Can anyone tell me why they aren't all aluminum?. The SP comes with a stainless steel, high capacity and aesthetically questionable muffler. Beautiful titanium twin mufflers, associated header pipes, and the requisite associated EPROM come in the crate with the bike (and no, the exhaust won't fit on a Mille). The lightweight components conspire to deduct about nine pounds off the weight of the standard Mille.

The frame has been stiffened by 20% over the Mille and the geometry of the SP is adjustable for swing arm pivot, steering head offset (which I've seen before) and the motor can be moved up and down in the frame by +-5mm (which I have not seen before).

And then there is the motor.

Like the Mille it is a fuel injected 60 degree V-Twin. Irregular power pulse spacing in a motorcycle can be desirable as it allows the rear tire some time to regain traction after the last hit of power broke it loose. A comparably powered twin will, therefore, highside less frequently that a equally spaced firing patterned four. This is the theory behind those big-bang GP motors which group the firing of four cylinders into a pattern more like a twin or a single.

To keep the engine narrow, often designers build their twins as a perfectly balanced 90 degree V. The problem then is keeping the wheelbase of the bike acceptably short hence the packaging problems that brought you the radial damper on the Suzuki TL. Aprilia avoided the issue by making their V 50% narrower at 60 degrees. The problem there is that it is no longer balanced and hence would quickly sterilize the rider. Although Italians will sacrifice much for speed, sterilization is on the short list of unacceptable penance.

To combat the vibration the Mille uses a plethora of balance shafts sprinkled throughout the engine. There are lots of them. And, more importantly, they work. The pegs, seat and bars had minimal vibration to obscure precious tire feedback although the tank was a bit of a paint mixer when gripped with the knees.

However all those shaft add weight and drag slowing down the motor. Aprilia therefore has intentionally sacrificed some amount of power for an increase in some amount of handling. Is it a good tradeoff for the street? Absolutely. Is it a tradeoff that will win races? That is for someone else to find out.

Unlike the Mille, Aprilia hired Cosworth to help with the SP motor design although Rotax builds both versions. The result was a motor with similar external dimensions but fundamentally different specifications resulting in different bore, stroke, cylinders and heads.

To increase upper liner strength the cylinder are of a closed deck design (meaning the cast material has water passages but is mostly connected, on an open deck the top of the liners in not connected to the outside of the waterjacket anywhere. The SP has new heads that feature a single liquid cooled spark plug (versus the Mille dual plug) and a five axis CNC machine combustion chamber with gorgeous forged pistons. The cases are sand cast (instead of die cast) and the dry sump uses a bigger oil pump than the Mille. This is supposed to produce 115 rear wheel bhp or 130 bhp with the included race pipe and Eprom which is about a 20% improvement over the Mille.

And, as either Muzzy or Zero Gravity will be happy to know, the factory is sitting by the phone just itching to have folks call and say that they need more power. State your credentials, your budget and your needs.

Cosworth retained the fancy back torque limiting clutch which is supposed to prevent the endemic problem of rear wheel hop while downshifting a big twin. Actually, it's a problem on pretty much any four-stroke race bike. The Aprilia clutch is a complex arrangement using intake vacuum to lighten the spring pressure on the clutch pack under closed throttle conditions. Mentor Mark Junge recommends slipping the clutch into turns to modulate the rear wheel hop to a rear wheel slide (I'll keep that in mind Mark) and the Aprilia system is supposed to perform this action for us less than coordinated racers.

Upon arrival home SO Melissa asked me what it was like to ride such an expensive and rare machine and if it's exclusivity inhibited my riding at all. Truthfully, when presented with a beautiful new racetrack and a fast bike with a steering damper, I just pinned it like anything else.

There were only five bikes available for fifteen riders so we did not get in as many laps as we would have liked. The weather had threatened rain but the sun burned through the clouds and illuminated the semi-fluorescent paint on the SPs.

Mugello is a big track with IRP complexity, Road Atlanta style elevation changes, Willow Springs pavement, Roebling Road run off and Atlanta Motor Speedway garages. It was a better track than anything I have seen in the US. Knowing that I was only going to get 24 laps and the sooner I knew the track the sooner I would be able to focus on the bike, I had spent some time on the flight over committing the track layout to memory. A serendipitous find was a Carl Fogarty annotated track map with gear selection. That saved a few laps of learning as well.

We were to have three twenty minute sessions and a five minute photo session. Pirelli supplied tires. We were to ride on DOT Dragon Evo Corsas.

In person the track is more beautiful and complex than I could have imagined from the track maps. It felt safe, grippy and challenging. The primary feature is long sweeping downhill turns which load up the front tire and beg for early, light positive throttle. The stiff suspension pours in tire feedback on the long sweepers and, although the two bumps on the track kick a bit, they are not in important parts of the track and are therefore, ignored.

Ignorance of the track highlighted some of the strengths of the bike. Indecisive throttle inputs (do I want to go faster? slower, no faster, NO SLOWER!) do not upset the suspension or cause the bike to sputter or cough while it waits for me to make up my mind. The bike was set-up face down butt high which would be good for the front-end intensive turns but also encourages rear wheel slides. I wasn't really goosing it at the exits of the turns but nor did I ever slide the rear end, either I'm a sissy or the spacing of power pulses stuff has something to it, or some combination of the two.

I had my knee down through four turns on the second lap, and that many again on the third. The bike steers very easily and makes mid corner corrections without drama. I know I shouldn't be making mid-corner corrections, but again, I was lost on the track.

Coming from 13,500 rpm fours, the 10,700 redline sort of caught me out with the bright red, integral shift light blinking almost continuously for the first couple laps. There is no top end rush such that the GSXRs deliver but more a giant hand pushing you forward whenever the throttle is opened.

Often I refer to the Six-Flags-Over-Texas-Runaway-Mine-Train feeling that occurs whenever a bike is not set up well. Running wide on the throttle, hard to turn, fighting the rider, inertia and gravity. It can take frustrating practice session after practice session or multiple race weekends to combat those setup problems.

This bike felt great right out of the pits. Ah, except for the footpegs. For whatever reason the bare aluminum pegs have a polished chevron design on them. Without a conscientious effort to keep my feet on the pegs they would slide around when I tried to reposition for corners. Obviously some different pegs would sort this out but it was a bit distracting on a new track to have to think about my feet so much.

Now, to some extent, that excellent handling has to do with the track. Since the track was so smooth, the suspension could be very stiff, which meant the geometry wouldn't change much, which meant the bike wouldn't change attitude on or off the throttle or on and off the brakes. This set-up would quickly compress a rider's spine at the typical American potholed, rutted and grooved American track.

The trick clutch worked wonderfully. I could drop two gears, pop out the clutch, let the rear wheel start oscillating while I braked, wait until the rear swung out on the opposite side to the corner, then turn and back on the gas. I thought for sure I was destined for the gravel trap as I could never consistently pull off that move on the AOD GSXR 600 but my bike (#123 incidentally) had only lean induced bodywork scratches by the end of the day.

Some clutches (see Yamaha, hydraulic, etc) can lack feel when trying to launch a bike hard where one has to balancing the throttle on the engagement point of the clutch. I didn't want to look like too much of a prat launching the bike out of the pits but figured that RW reader's deserved to know. Although two race starts is hardly indicative of a clutch's durability, and without Trey Batey and Glenn Szarek lined up next to me for reference, I felt that the bike came off the line hard and predictably. The ample torque of the motor made for a nice eight inch high hundred foot wheelie which settled with a slight squeal on the shift to second.

I spoke to some of the local Italian riders who, being more familiar with the track were going fast early on. I asked him how he liked the bike. He brightened and said in broken English "It's easy. Fast and easy. Si?"

In the second session I tried to step up the pace. Despite the face down orientation of the bike the front end would still get light and start wagging on the throttle coming out of the turns. It wouldn't powerlift in the manner of a tuned 750 but would just lazily shake the bars. Sometime more rear preload counters this phenomenon but it might just be the nature of such a powerful, quick steering bike.

I had learned to shift much earlier in the rev range to avoid bumping the rev limiter. This strategy paid dividends with more flowing lines through the combination turns without having to shift mid-corner and using the prodigious torque to pull the bike through the turns. Although the bike never felt fast, it was. Often at hilly tracks one can get caught without enough entrance speed and the motor struggling to pull revs up a hill (see turn five at Road Atlanta). On the SP it never lacked for pull and often partial throttle seemed sufficient to guide the bike through the blind uphill sections.

Even on the very fast front straight, the efficient fairing and smooth motor belied the speed the bike was generating, until one sat up at the brake markers and felt the wind trying to remove one's head. I wasn't able to tuck in behind the fairing very well as my helmet and the black trim on the rider's edge of the windshield were incompatible. Like the smooth pegs, just a slight detail that would be easy to fix for racing.

At my faster pace I missed a shift. A couple other folks spoke of it as well. More attention made sure that it only happened once more but that was attention I would have preferred to spend avoiding the gently sloping curb on the outside of the track.

During my third session I dragged something on the left hand side of the bike and slid the front tire through a slow turn. The tires were new for the session but they were well scrubbed as it was my sixth lap. The front end had been giving me good feedback. The feedback I was getting was that the front was about to wash, when I pushed a little harder it did. The chassis recovered nicely and I avoided a visit to the gravel but, had I been racing the next day, I would have asked for the front end dropped even a little more and a softer front tire. Even at lost moto-journalist paced we were wearing out the tires in thirty laps or less. Fortunately they had a truck full of them.

On the racetrack pretty much all bikes feel slow because one keeps them in such a narrow rev range. One never gets a run up the ramp of the powerband like drag racing one's friends stoplight to stoplight. In the photo session I took the opportunity to do a few first gear powerlifts. The bike went vertical at the dip of the throttle. It's powerful, but the chassis channels the power so effectively it never felt like it before.

This is not surprising. The RS 250 handles great even if the motor is a little slow. The RSV SP handles great, and the motor is really fast. Although a GSXR 750 is a little shorter, a little lighter, a little narrower and has about the same power, it is much more of a handful to ride.

Given a choice for the Daytona 200 next year I would take the Mille SP over my GSXR. Of course, this is where reality rears its ugly head, the day ends and they take my SP away from me.

Perhaps my forearms and palms supplied the most telling review at the end of the day. Typically, after riding hard, I would have little white blisters under the calluses at the base of my fingers and tender forearms from wrestling the bike side to side. After 24 tense laps trying to ride fast at an unfamiliar track I felt nothing in my forearms, not a blister on my hand. Easy. Easy and Fast. Si.

Why Am I Dressed Like This?

Photo- Melissa Berkoff

It became apparent that David Aldana had used up all the available RW covers featuring black leathers with skeletal motifs when Ulrich declared that new leathers were in order for the Aprilia cover shot at Mugello. As we had four days to secure said leathers, have the RW logo added and make the plane for Italia a custom suit was out and something prêt-a-porter was in order.

AGV sport has offices nary forty minutes from Washington DC so they naturally won the selection process for attire. I asked for a suit with lots of black and it was dumb luck that the colors almost exactly matched the "SP only" Mille color scheme.

I have always had a problem with off the rack clothes as I have sort of big shoulders and a girly waist. Apparently so do the figure models for AGV as a size 52 suit fit well, down to the feeler gauge fit at the wrists. The Sport Cyber suit (built by Corner for AGV in Italy) is well perforated, armoured, foamed appropriately and had lots of stitching in the important areas. I particularly liked the knit collar but the cuffs has some scratchy nylon zipper ends and thread. Not the sort of thing you notice when trying to keep the throttle open through a long downhill left hand turn at Mugello but the sort of thing you notice when waiting around for yet another set of Pirellis to be mounted to your Mille SP.

I haven't worn many different sets of leathers (maybe five companies) but it seems that some leathers are built with an emphasis on rider mobility and comfort while others are built for durability (multiple crashes before repair is required) My Harro (German) and these AGV (Italian) would qualify in the former, Vanson in the latter. I didn't get a chance to crash in them (intentions denied by a shortened last session) so there is no knowledge of the leather but the knee sliders seemed to wear very quickly. These puppers list for one dime less than $1000.00

AGV helmets were a popular courier helmet in DC in the 80s. The one I used then was very light but noisy. Current quality is much improved. The Q3 helmet was well ventilated, the visors fit well and were easy to change and, it was pretty quiet. It seemed to soak up the sweat from my forehead pretty well (keeping it out of my eyes) and evaporated it with vents so the helmet didn't get saturated. I didn't have a Shoei or FM to try back to back but the AGV did seem low on my brow making it difficult to fully tuck in behind the fairing and still see forward, of course, it may have been the piece of black trim Aprilia installed on the windshield as well. They are available in seven sizes and range from solids at $400 less a dime and graphics will run you an additional $30 to $75. The playing card theme is in the $75 category.

Gloves are GTK2 - dime under $70

Boots are 585s - list for a dime under $260.