In which a badass dude gives me an badass-er gift. I know that’s not a word.
Did you miss Part 6? The Tesi hits 7,500 miles.
A month ago, our friend Brook Henry of Vee Two Australia was working at our shop for a pre-scheduled residency of sorts where he was working on some bevel Ducatis for our clients. He had previously mentioned that he was going to have a couple of AHRMA race bikes from the fine folks at Boulder Motorsports, but I didn’t remember that when I pulled into work one day and saw an unexpected van/trailer in our back parking lot. The man driving said van was Shane Turpin – it’s hard to summarize what he does in one sentence but he’s been winning championships since the 1990s and even earned a wild card entry for a World Superbike race at Miller Motorsports Park!
Photo by Steve Midgley Photography
Among other things, he currently manages the collection for one of the Boulder guys, and he was surprised to see me pull up on my Tesi 3D Final Edition. It turns out that he used to be the National Sales Manager for Bimota in the mid 2000s, which is why you’ll see him mentioned in stories like this 2008 review of the Tesi 3D by Blake Conner.
Photo from Cycle World
One of the first versions of the Tesi 3D that Bimota offered was the “Concept Limited Edition America,” I believe they made 29 of them. Shane used to own the first (#000) of them, and it’s the very bike in the above CW review. Little to my knowledge, when Shane saw that I owned a Tesi and was actually riding it on a regular basis, he made a mental note to bring me something special the next time he came by Iconic.
Well, he came by last week and surprised me with it: turns out that owners of the Concept America bikes got an Officina del Tempo watch that was serialized to their bike (not something that happened with the Final Edition) and incredibly, Shane gifted me his!
I recently hit 10k miles with the Tesi (more on that later, but I just hit you guys with a 7.5k mile update yesterday) and after it gets another set of tires I’ll be able to put a bunch more miles on it riding it up to Monterey and back for the Quail Motorcycle Gathering (more on that later, too). Hope I’ll see you there!
Thank you, Shane. What a wonderful gift! I promise to be a good caretaker of it.
On to Part 8 – The Tesi hits 10,000 miles.