CAFÉ RACER 76

HONDA CB400N BY OFFICINE MR. S

Honda CB400N customized by the Italian motorcycle builder Officine Mr. S

Nestled against the northwestern Sicilian coastline is a town called Alcamo. Known for its white wine and beautiful seaside, it’s also home to emerging Italian builder Isidoro Stellino.

Stellino began his career at the age of 18 as a coffee roaster in his family’s shop, before taking up TIG welding as a trade. Now 36, he’s been building bikes for the past two years as Officine Mr. S. His latest creation is this 1982 Honda CB400N, put together with the help of an architect friend of his.

Nicknamed the CB400S – to signify its scrambler disposition – it’s a charming and well-proportioned bike, and features some very nice hand-made parts. For starters, Stellino harnessed his TIG welding skills to make new 2-into-1 exhaust headers from stainless steel, fabricating intricate flanges to secure them and attaching an up-swept reverse cone muffler. The motor support plates and rear brake strut are also one-offs.

Little more than a good service and some carb tuning was needed on the mechanical side – but the wiring was completely re-done and the airbox ditched. The fuel tank’s a scrapyard find of unknown origin, and has a new CNC cap fitted. Stellino’s painted it a classic red, with matching accents on the spark plug wires, fuel lines and air filters. Most of the remaining bits have been coated black, with the exception of the engine – which has deliberately been given a distressed finish.

The CB400S has an air of practicality about it with Mitas trial tires, fork boots and fenders at both ends. Stellino’s cleaned up the cockpit with a mini speedo, vintage enduro-style headlight and Biltwell Kung Fu grips. Alloy number plates and dirt-bike handlebars round the scrambler motif off nicely. The new seat is particularly nice though – it’s been covered with black leather on the sides and blue Alcantara on top.

Right now Officine Mr. S has four other bikes in the shop, and I honestly can’t wait to see them. If he keeps this up, he’ll soon be able to add his name to the list of things that Alcamo is famous for.

Images by Alessandro Giglio.

via BIKEEXIF

DUCATI 749 BY APOGEE MOTORWORKS

The horses ridden by the four horsemen of the apocalypse are said to be white, red, black and pale. After having a look over the heavily modified Ducati 749 you see here, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the black horse, which I guess makes Gustavo Penna of Apogee Motorworks the friendliest harbinger of global doom you’re ever likely to meet.

The bike started life as a stock Ducati 749, Gustavo used it as his canyon carver and weekend track bike for a number of years before he decided to take out the spanners and see what was hiding beneath the Pierre Terblanche designed fairings. In order to make the new, stripped back 749 truly apocalyptic he opted to install a fire-spewing 749R engine – a power unit with a higher red line than the stock engine as well as racing cams, titanium valves, valve guides, and connecting rods, magnesium head covers, a slipper clutch and carbon fiber belt covers.

Terblanche’s original design for the 749 included a fuel tank and seat that could be slid forwards or backwards to suit the rider and allow perfect posture – sadly the feature didn’t make the production line, but Gustavo liked the idea and so he re-engineered the rear sub-frame and fuel tank to allow full adjustability.

Perhaps the element on the bike that received more attention than any other was that beautiful exhaust, Gustavo designed it with the help of his friend who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The two men used computational fluid dynamics to optimise the design, then 3D printed it to ensure it fit around the tightly packaged Desmodromic L-twin before having it welded by hand from titanium.

If you think that the finished bike looks like the sort of thing that’d be ridden by a Russian millionaire, the CEO of Audi North America or the President of Azerbaijan you’d be correct on all 3 counts – Gustavo has already built 3 other Ducatis based on the 749 you see here (which he named ‘Francesca’) and shipped them to the 3 men mentioned above. He’s now taking orders for additional units, each bike takes a minimum of 90 days to build depending on the donor motorcycle and he’ll only work with Trellis-framed Ducatis.

If you’d like to contact Gustavo and order your own custom you can click here, we’ll also be keeping a close eye on his future builds – specifically for white, red and pale motorcycles.

Ducati 749 15 740x739 Ducati 749 by Apogee Motorworks

via SILODROME

10th Albania Rally : Cosentino and Sina/Wittberger winners.

The 10th "Albania Rally" is nearly before history! Today (Saturday) the rally closed with the last stage of 20 kms timed section, which showed a dramatic fight in the bikes between the Czech Ondrej Klimciw (Husqvarna) and the Italian Andrea Cosentino (KTM).

Klimciw was leading the rally until Friday when he lost some times in a sheep flock. He tried everything to catch back the lost 4 minutes to the former winner Cosentino and eventually took the stagewin today - but this was not enough. As the organization as preview reported, Cosentino has won the race in the bikes with only some seconds in front of Klinciw and the Italian Christian Pastori.

In the cars, the eventually new winner will be a "senior" winner: Renti Sina and Dolly Wittberger could climb position by position after a bad start in the race and pushed their new built Toyota Land Cruiser to the top-position. Second eventually are the Albanians Dervishaj / Papuli in their small LILU 2 prototype in front of former "Rally Breslau"-winner and German Henrik Strasser with the "comeback" of his "Lila Q" Toyota Land Cruiser prototype.

In the last stage, some cars crashed after an curve but nobody was injured.

Start a classy watch collection with these entry-level classics

Start your own watch collection with watches from the Classic Driver Market

Are you tired of vulgar designs, inflated prices and faux-limited editions? Then avoid the marketing babble and start a collection of characterful vintage watches, guided by our choice of reasonably priced entry-level timepieces. After all, class requires a healthy dose of understatement…