Every Laverda that Jean-Louis Olive lays his hands on gets the star treatment. Most of his projects are restorations, but this 1978 1200 Jota America was a full-blown custom job. And it turned out so good, it starred in the pages of Practical Sportbikes magazine in the UK. Jean-Louis is more than a little obsessed…
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If there’s one company that symbolizes the style of the new wave custom scene, it’s the Wrenchmonkees. Their motorcycles are raw, simple and pure—the legendary Danish design aesthetic applied to two wheels, and roughed up a little. An early ’70s Laverda 750 given the Wrenchmonkees treatment sounds like a marriage made in heaven. And the…
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Ah, Laverda. The great, lost name of motorcycling. KTM now has a mortgage on vibrant orange motorcycles, but in the 70s the color was synonymous with the Breganze factory in northern Italy. Few builders get the chance to work on Laverdas these days, but Takashi Iwamoto of Cascade Cafe Racer in Hawthorne, California is one…
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One of the great tragedies of modern motorcycling is the death of the Laverda name. The brand was bought by Aprilia at the turn of the century—along with Moto Guzzi—but the familiar ‘SFC Orange’ has yet to reappear in showrooms. To my eyes, that lovely color has always looked best on a Jota, and this…
Read more »The Laverda Jota sticks in my mind as the ultimate seventies superbike: it’s the two-wheeled equivalent of the iconic Lamborghini Muira. This…
Read more »This delicately beautiful cafe racer uses a Laverda trellis frame and a late-production, modified Commando 850 engine. It was built by French…
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