Urban SUPERBIKE

Motorcycle or scooter? When even the manufacturer doesn't know, the lines are definitely blurred!

- WORDS: Alan Cathcart

Every so often someone comes up with a completely different concept for a powered two-wheeler - think of the original Ténéré XT600Z back in 1983, or the TDM850, or the T-MAX maxi-scooter, or the stack-shaft Yamaha R1 which reinvented the UJM four.

Yes, but how about another brand? Sure how about the Ducati Monster first-ever Naked sportbike, or the Honda CB750, first of the fours, or the Ducati Supermono with its horizontal cylinder and articulated counterbalancer? Or the small Bologna-based Italjet company, with its huge array of ingenious novelties produced during its first 44 years of existence, during which Italjet marketed more than 150 different imaginatively-designed motorcycles and scooters. Most of them were created by company founder Leopoldo Tartarini, the genial, pipe-smoking, Jaguar-driving design genius who passed away in 2015 after a lifetime of innovation that included conceiving the Dragster scooter.

Tartarini’s son Massimo, 59, owner of Italjet today, has now come up with a dramatically innovative concept his dad would have been proud of, and he’s just put it into production as a 2026 model. It’s the Italjet Dragster 700 Twin, a motorcycle that looks like a scooter or is it a scooter that thinks it’s a bike? Only one way to find out, and that was to borrow one of the first examples off the production line for a day to become the first person outside Italjet to take it for a real world road ride in everyday street conditions. Well, it beats being asked to form an opinion of what it’s like to ride on the basis of just three laps of the Imola GP race circuit, which comprised the road test element of the model’s press launch!