Cooked Goose

COOKED GOOSE

Three cheers for the tricolore

PHIL LITTLE NEVER MUCH CARED for shaft-driven motorcycles. As proprietor of Omar's Dirt Track Racing,his tastes run toward lean,purposeful machines,such as the Yamaha XS650s for which his company makes dirt-track conversion kits. But when he spied this 1974 Moto Guzzi V7 Sport languishing in a Minnesota dealership in 1996, he had to have it. Why? First and foremost,it looked like it needed a good home.The bike was,Little saya,"cloaked in ugly neglect,bad paint and rust."Second, this late-model Sport is a bit of a rarity

in that it features dual front disc brakes, a timing chain instead of gears and a racy solo saddle. Lastly, it is lean and purposeful, even with a driveshaft. He offered an old dirtbike in trade and became the new owner. The Sport was promptly delivered to Trackstar, a Minneapolis Guzzi dealer, where Marty Mataya rebuilt the 33,000-mile, 750cc V-Twin engine using 900cc Venolia pistons. Little, meanwhile, went to work on the chas sis, polishing the brightwork and stripping the formerly black-anodized Borrani rims before repainting them red. He then crafted a fiberglass seat cowl and painted that, the tank the sidecovers and the Le Mans front fender Porsche Red with an Italian flag motif running fore-to-aft. The crowing touch was a set of custom decals whose Roman numerals look as though they read "VII Sport," coincidentally the name of the retro-styled bike that Moto Guzzi unveiled at last year's Munich Show. Little has since sold the Sport to fund his latest project, a Suzuki GT750 cafe-racer. Chain-driven, it is neither lean nor purposeful. well, not yet, anyway.

—Brian Catterson