Aprilia Rsv Mille

Aprilia RS V Mille

CYCLE WORLD TEST

Spirit and performance to nourish the soul and tear up the road

ARKNESS BEGINS TO SEEP INTO YOUR spirit. The usual benign indifference of the universe suddenly looks pregnant with malice, as if at every turn all the great forces of chaos suddenly organize and rally to frus-

trate your every move. You know litany of pain: Bad work schedule gets worse, flat tire, ; broken-down truck (keys locked inside!), each difficulty coming at the most awkward time and compounding the next until you come to a point where a snapped shoelace just might push you over the edge.

Then you realize your riding boots don’t have laces. Hope flickers. That nail in your tire that felt like the final peg in your coffin? Pound it out from the inside-there’s a bike to ride, an Italian one at that!

This is the point at which having a motorcycle that reanimates your spirit-moves body and soul-can be the carrot that brings you back from the edge, the thing that reminds (you life can be good.

The Aprilia RSV Mille is just such a motorcycle-artful and beautiful, spiritually engineered like so many other machines from Italy. Aprilia has somehow managed to integrate a quirk-free, almost-Japanese functionality without dulling that animated mechanical relationship we expect to have with an Italian motorcycle.

But put aside for a moment your questions about how it works, and look at what it is. The distinctive, Genus Insecta “fly’s eye” headlight array, flies (ha!) in the face of the current cat’s-eye, pointy-nose styling trend. The wellfinished twin-spar aluminum frame peeks out between shrink-wrap bodywork and luscious fuel tank, with a stoutyet-elegantly curvaceous swingarm that almost seems to glide away from the back of the compact (and essentially invisible), dry-sump 60-degree V-Twin. About the only element to give your eyeballs pause is the Jetsons styling treatment of the tailsection. Makes you wonder where the tailfins are. It’s a sort of visual cymbal crash that’s either jarring or stirring depending upon your personal taste. Paint finish and panel fit is very good, though some of the black-plastic pieces (rear inner fender, chainguard and dashtop) have a cheap look.

As a package, though, it’s a success, thanks in no small part to the fact that it bears more than a passing resemblance to Aprilia’s incredibly successful RS250 Grand Prix racebike. The company’s stylists have built a streetbike drawing on the company’s world-championship-winning racers that distinctly says Aprilia, not generic sportbike.

A closer perusal brings to light numerous well-thought-out features that reveal both a depth of design and a sensitivity to cool that is delightful: eccentric adjustment on brake and shift levers; various color-anodized aluminum suspension details; built-in lap timer; adjustable shift light on a frontand-center tach; kilometer/mile mode; peak-speed memory; average-speed memory; a clock; and what’s this? A normal, non-spring-loaded kickstand?! From Italy? Yes!

Like to do your own mechanical work or fiddle with the suspension? Attention was paid to these things, and execution of most basic tuning/maintenance tasks is straightforward. There’s plenty of space around the fully adjustable shock to get at the threaded spring-preload collars. Fairing panels are easy to remove and replace, and sparkplug access for the twin-plug heads can actually be referred to as access. There’s a prop rod for the fuel tank, which aids in getting to the large airbox and its filter. The only accessibility gripe we have is the shock’s buried rebound-damping adjuster-the decent toolkit’s screwdriver is much too short to reach.

All told, though, it appears as if there was lengthy communication between Aprilia’s streetbike designers and racing department.

This is also revealed in riding. Turn the key in preparation for starting and the analog tach needle sweeps through its range up to the point at which the shift light is set to illuminate (you choose this value), where it pauses, then returns to zero. Ready to go, then. Cold, the engine fires quickly, but has a tendency to come abruptly unstarted if you shut down the fast-idle lever too soon. Best to let it idle till you’ve got 100 degrees F showing on the digital display (it flashes “Cold” until 95), then ride off.

Aside from the above, this is fuel-injection perfection. Engine response is silky, immediate and quick-revving, but never abrupt, even in off/on transition. Where other throttles are roughly hewn tools, the Aprilia’s light twist responds like a fine instrument-incremental input draws the expected incremental response. It’s almost intuitive.

In the CW carbon-monoxide hut (oh honey, what is that lovely scent...?), the Mille cranked out hydrocarbons to the tune of 111 ponies and 67.6 foot-pounds of torque. Healthy, and interestingly not at all unlike the numbers we got from our most recent Ducati 996 testbike (106 bhp and 68 ft.-lbs.).

Another discovery we made on the dyno was that a single wire leading into the engine-management computer had been clipped. What gives, we wondered? Much in the same way many enduro bikes are sold corked up with restrictive inserts in the airbox and exhaust, so comes the Mille. The clipped wire activates an alternate map in the stock chip that suits a less restricted ingress and egress of gasses. Ours had been fully uncorked, worth an estimated 5 bhp over the choked bike. Essentially, every Mille has this performance potential locked within, available at no cost except time. Think of it as fine-tuning.

Flogging this thing through the quarter-mile is an almost tragic misuse-and it showed. Start-line wheelies were difficult to control, particularly since the pneumatically assisted wet clutch was grabby under launch load. It’s got a heavy pull, too, despite the innovative vacuum-assist. Still, the booming VTwin cranked out an admirable 10.81-second run at 129.4 mph, or about a tenth of a second quicker through the whole quarter-mile than the last 996 we tested, though the Due’s run characteristically had been handicapped by a fried clutch.

The story the dyno and quarter-mile testing doesn’t tell is the quality of the power. The flow is so rich, so immediate and crisp, as though every fuel molecule is maximized-it’s almost as if each one is happy, exuberant even, to release its energy to the cause of spirited motion. This is the kind of torque-rich power that makes choosing when to shift a real choice. Rev it like a madman (all the way to the 10,500 revlimiter) or run a gear high, it’s largely irrelevant. The Mille jumps off comers like a frog.

As made painfully evident on the dragstrip, first-gear wheelies are a fact of life. But rather than snapping up suddenly, the thing just torques up nicely as the tach needle sweeps into the midrange.

The RSV’s twin balancer shafts do an excellent job of quelling the vibes brought about by the inherently shaky 60degree Vee configuration. (To find out why this is, and more, see Kevin Cameron’s tech analysis of the Mille in the March, 1998, issue). So balanced, the essential character of this engine is not at all unlike that of a 90-degree V-Twin, but without the bulk. It’s wonderful work that emits surprisingly good sounds from the giant, stainless-steel silencer.

It’s a nice soundtrack that somehow seems that much better when you’re fully leaned over, arcing gracefully through your favorite series of comers. The Mille’s chassis feels so together, so integrated that your chosen lean angle and cornering line become The Truth. There’s superb feedback with an excellent sense of traction. Mid-comer pavement irregularities are absorbed, no drama, and the bike’s slightly wide clipons help make it easy to swing through quick transitions.

The front end tracks over bumps without bottoming under hard braking. It also trail-brakes well-the fork keeps working despite the load and the chassis exhibits only a minor tendency to stand up. General braking performance is, however, somewhat perplexing. Initial bite is strong without being grabby, but at-the-limit braking takes an unusually high effort. Out on the street, the Brembos feel better than the average braking-distance numbers suggest.

The fully adjustable 43mm Showa fork and Sachs-Boge shock (Sachs also makes the standard steering damper) tend toward stiff. Overall, the Mille’s chassis feels and responds very much like the 996 (identical rake and trail as the Due’s “street” setting, interestingly enough),

though the Aprilia’s riding position is certainly more humane; it was likened by one tester to that of the most recent-and most comfy-Honda CBR900RR, although the Mille’s tank is much narrower-feeling. Seat foam isn’t abundant, but it’s a pad that will carry you the day without crushing your butt’s spirit.

Point the front wheel down Racer Road and this information-rich motorcycle will feed your confidence, which in turn helps you relax, making the bike work better, which feeds your confidence.. .and so it goes until you’re riding faster than you thought possible. In simple terms, the RSV offers absolutely yikes-free handling, the tractable engine and forgiving chassis working together in a way that suggests the motorcycle was thought of and conceived as a complete system, not a collection of parts.

So while some bikes attack the asphalt with a sort of ruthless efficiency-its own kind of pleasure, to be sure-others suggest a certain humanity, a way about them that is no less speedy, but somehow more elegant and artful in the doing of more with less. The Mille combines the almost frightful, pavementdevouring nature and high-tech of the Yamaha YZF-Rl with the artful, impassioned spirit and ridability of a 996-a little science, a little magic, a lot of fun. We ponder with great interest just where Honda’s RC5l super-Twin will fit in all this.

The RSV would be an impressive piece of work from any manufacturer. That it comes from Aprilia and represents a first effort in a large-displacement category is truly remarkable.

Will Aprilia’s name become as synonymous with Superbike performance as Ducati’s? Based on the Mille, it’s hard to envision anything but success for Aprilia. Because with the RSV, life is good. It’s the kind of bike that just doesn’t have any shoelaces to break. □

EDITORS' NOTES

HAVING SPENT MORE DAYS THAN I CARE to remember in psychiatric hospitals (I was an employee...), Eve had ample time to stare dementia in the face. Once, amid all the viciously hostile epithets and unusual, vaguely threatening behavior, a cracked-up former professor of calculus said, “My goal is to discover the square root of 2.” That’s a hard problem, because there is no exact

square root of 2. As we discussed this, his mind was clear, focused and working beautifully. That nagging psychosis thing didn’t matter, just the aspirations of harnessing the infinite, the striving for unobtainable answers. I expected the same from the RSV Mille. I expected an Italian motorcycle tinged with madness that was uncomfortable in everyday life and had difficulty functioning in the real world, but worked beautifully when directed toward the hard problem of absolute performance. What I got was a well-adjusted machine; the Mille is brilliance without madness. This motorcycle works. -Mark Hover, Sports Editor

THERE ARE TIMES WHEN NUMBERS ON paper can be a bit misleading. Such is the case with the Aprilia RSV Mille.

Compare its power-to-weight ratio, quarter-mile performance and stopping distance from 60 mph with those of many 600cc to liter-class machines, and you may begin to question all the hype the press has given this Italian Twin. Much of what makes the Mille such a great

sporting tool simply can’t be quantified by the cold calculations gathered with our testing gear.

Telepathically tractable power, super-solid stability, loads of cornering clearance and very progressive-feeling brakes make for a sure recipe when stirring it up on your favorite backroads. While some sportbikes offer stellar performance capabilities that few owners can hope to tap, the Mille’s confidence-inspiring manners can unlock a rider’s own potential. Did I hear someone suggest lap times might serve a useful purpose after all...? -Don Canet, Road Test Editor

So, WE SEND STAFF SPEEDBOY CANET OFF to Barcelona late in ’98 for the world press launch of the RSV Mille. Obviously plied with copious quantities of Apriliasponsored rioja, he returns spouting all kinds of propaganda. “This is the real deal,” he enthuses. “Exotic styling, Italian flair and stunning performance, all at a fair price.” All well and good, but a full year goes by and still no stateside Milles.

We do get a crack, though, at the SL 1000 roadster-same basic motor in a less racy chassis. Two days of riding are laid on at Aprilia USA headquarters in Georgia. Strangely enough, Canet goes again and apparently enticed by a bagful of unmarked $20s under the seat, comes back positively raving. “Pretty remarkable stuff for a company that is only entering its second year of producing large-displacement streetbikes,” he affirms.

Well, we’ve all had a chance to sample the Mille now, and Canet is not alone-we’ve all fallen under the RSV’s spell. Aprilia is the real deal.

No kickbacks required. -David Edwards, Editor-in-Chief

APRILIA

RSV MILLE

$13,499

SPECIFICATIONS