I absolutely love my Tesi 3D, but I’m not going to pretend that the ownership experience has been perfect. Often times when I hear stories from people that spent a lot of money on a bike, it feels to me like they are trying to make the bike sound better than it is so that it doesn’t look like they wasted money. Well, here’s my attempt to not be hypocritical.
The Tesi has spent more than its fair share on a lift in Daniel’s (our service manager) bay over the last year and a half.
Seeing as this post will likely end up coming off negative because I’m hitting you with 18 months of issues at once as opposed to spreading them out as they happened, I want to make it clear from the beginning that despite all the foibles, I would still do it again. The positives greatly outweigh the negatives, and I’ll continue to share the positives in future parts of the story. I just figure that because there aren’t many Tesis around (especially ones being ridden), you’d be interested in everything about the experience – whether it’s good or bad. Some of this stuff is about the design in general, and some of it is about my specific bike.
1. The turning radius is abysmal. This is a known trade-off of the hub center steering front end – there’s just 23 degrees of steering lock (though that’s up from 18 on the Tesi 2D).
Not much side to side action here. Photo by Nathan May
I am not able to turn the bike around on a regular two-lane road without making a three-point turn. Wheeling the bike around the shop is more difficult than with any other bike (at least it doesn’t weigh much) and simple parking lot maneuvers become not-so-simple.
On a related note, a common complaint with these bikes is a “lack of front end feel.” This is mostly due to the fact that the steering isn’t very direct – the force you put through the handlebars has to go through a series of linkages, each of which introduces the tiniest bit of slop but it all adds up. I recorded a video showing the differences between my Tesi 3D and a Vyrus 985 and spent about a minute showing how the Tesi steering works if you’re interested:
I agree that there’s less feel but I think the complaint is overblown/frequently repeated on internet forums by people who have never actually ridden the bike – I don’t believe it’s that big of a deal. I think part of this is may be because I’ve spent most of my riding time on BMWs with the Duolever/Hossack front end, and people have similar (but less severe) complaints about “feel” with that set up. So maybe I’m just used to it.
Photo by Nathan May
2. The fuel range.
The gas tank is claimed to carry 4.23 gallons with a 1.3 gallon reserve. I would typically see the reserve light around 105 miles and I don’t think I ever pushed it past 120 miles before getting gas.
However, just like many Ducati tanks from the mid 2000s (when the first Tesi 3D came out), this Bimota tank is made out of nylon and it expands when exposed to America’s horrible fuel with ethanol in it. I noted some small signs of expansion pretty quickly but I didn’t want to park the bike for a third of a year (our go-to tank repairer/cleaner/liner is GTL in North Hollywood and they had a 4-month backlog at the time). But then problem #4 happened below and the bike was parked anyway. While that was getting fixed, my friend Jay said he’d line my tank.
This photo has nothing to do with my Tesi, but Jay is awesome. Here’s one of my favorite bikes of his, a custom Laverda 1200:
My tank (which was surprisingly heavy, even before the liner) all wrapped up and getting lined:
Jay wasn’t happy with how it turned out the first time, so he had to strip the liner and do it again. He’s a good friend!
That lining obviously takes up some volume (roughly 0.6 gallons in this case), so now I see the reserve light around 80 miles. For someone who rides as much as I do, that’s a frustratingly small number. If I’m just commuting to work and back, I have to fill up every two days.
3. Loosening fasteners. Big v-twins vibrate a lot and the Ducati 1100 is no exception. Still – even on my second ride I had stuff trying to fall off on me.
I had just hopped on the highway when a nice person came up along side me and starting frantically pointing at the rear end of my bike. I was worried something was on fire but didn’t see anything at first glance so I quickly pulled over. At first I couldn’t see any issues, but eventually I noticed that one of the two bolts securing the license plate holder had backed itself out so the hangar was bouncing around. Thanks for pointing this out, stranger!
The battery tray nuts frequently abandoned me, and one of the nuts securing the front of the tank ran away.
The first couple of times it happened, I chalked it up to “oddball Italian manufacturer problems.” But it kept happening, so then I complained and Bimota Spirit took the bike to give it a once over and make sure everything was OK. A friend of mine suggested that my bike probably never got an official PDI as it was built when right before Bimota went bankrupt, so there’s a good chance that it was just cobbled together and then thrown in a room, waiting to rot or for someone to save the company. I don’t have any sort of proof of this, but it’s an interesting thought.
A quick tangent: Bimota was actually planning on making 250 examples of a cafe racer version of the Tesi 3D (which they called RaceCafe, of course) but they went bankrupt before they could make any beyond the original. The one that survives has carbon fiber front and rear swingarms, but apparently the original spec was to use the Ducati 800cc L-Twin found in the new-at-the-time Scrambler lineup.
Once the Tesi came back to me, the shop at Iconic also re-did the front end with safety wire and added cross-check torque seal for an extra level of security.
4. This is a Ducati issue and not a Bimota issue, but if I’m riding the bike then at the end of the day they’re all “Abhi issues“: a few miles after the track day, the oxygen sensor for the rear cylinder shorted internally and the bike died. I was riding up the 405 North on my way home from work when the bike simply died in the carpool lane. Thankfully I had enough momentum (even going uphill) that I could coast over to the right side of the freeway and pop off on the next exit. It was around this time that Vy asked if I should get rid of the Tesi, because she was sick of me having problems with it. I don’t blame her.
After I got it towed back to the shop, we couldn’t get the Bimota computer to connect the TEXA system that we use at Iconic. So we went to the wiring diagram…except the wiring diagram that Bimota sent us was for the Tesi 3D and not my Tesi 3D Final Edition. We pointed this out to Bimota (through Bob at Bimota Spirit) but they weren’t able to provide us the correct one.
These are the things that happen when a company goes bankrupt and gets brought back to life – I’m sure if I needed something for one of their new Kawasaki-powered bikes they’d be able to help. But a bike made by the previous, defunct firm? No luck. So we tried to make do, but as you can imagine, that did not go well. There were a surprising amount of differences in the wiring between the regular 3D and the Final Edition.
So Daniel started attacking the Tesi with a multimeter until he figured out what the problem was. It took a few weeks for us to get the parts and to put the bike back together – by the time I was ready to enjoy it again I had owned the Bimota for 14 months and it had been parked with problems for about a third of that.
Those are my main complaints, but while I’m in the nitpicking mood I’ll add one silly little thing that I said I would get a video of in Part 2 of this story: a small speaker plays a beeping sound when you have the turn signals on. I assume someone implemented this as a reminder if you leave your turn signal on, but I think it’s goofy and I’ve never encountered it with any other bike so I can’t imagine it’s a legal requirement in a different country.
One thing I have to stress – Bob Steinbugler (the owner of Bimota Spirit, the US distributor for Bimota) has been absolutely wonderful to deal with through both the highs and the lows of Bimota ownership. When you deal with such a niche brand, it’s crucial to have a point person who is knowledgeable and easy to deal with. Bob has made my Bimota life better, just like Joe Karvonen makes the Kramer ownership experience better for US customers.
I know I owe you an update on this bike, also!
So, there have definitely been some foibles. But I’m up to about 7,000 miles on the bike and like I said above – knowing what I do now, I’d still buy it again. As the above things have been addressed, the bike now seems to be approaching a level of reliability I’m comfortable with.
I’m still in love with the width (or the lack thereof), the weight (again, the lack thereof), and how different it is.
I’d think long and hard before taking it on a track again, (due to stress on the bike and the nagging feeling in the back of my head that if something was to happen it would be hard to track down parts) but weekend canyon blasts are amazing and being able to hop on something this rare and interesting makes even a “boring” commute special to me. I just wouldn’t own it as an only bike!
Enough writing about it – now I’m off to ride it!
On to Part 5!