laverda jota v yamaha xs1100

The Laverda Jota and XS1100 are the products of two completely different cultures and design philosophies. Rod Gibson and Chris Pearson took a couple of examples and put them head-to-head.

What makes a muscle bike? Some folks like to wrestle with raw, unmanageable power in flimsy frames. Others consider the ability to demolish distance effortlessly with a twist of the wrist a more worthy measure. A mixture of these two extremes is what produces a real classic bike: power, composure and a touch of the dangerous; something that requires skill to handle properly but, ridden well, rewards the rider with a lot of hard, fast miles.

Pity, then, the poor designer, who has to conjure up this elusive mix of qualities from a blank sheet of paper and satisfy the demands of marketing departments and engineers who actually have to build and sell the thing afterwards. It's hardly surprising that big muscle bikes can be so different to ride, especially when they originate from two such different cultures as the two bikes here.

The Laverda Jota was, for a brief but golden spell in the late 70s, the most powerful and fastest production motorcycle that money could buy. The product of a small, family-owned concern, the Jota was the result of many years spent refining a simple basic layout until it crossed a design threshold and became something much greater than the sum of its parts. It was rare, expensive, exotic and drop-dead gorgeous. And it was fast. Fast enough to frighten most road testers of the day and fast enough rapidly to become the stuff of legend.

The XS1100 was, by comparison, a much stodgier bike, in image at least. Undeniably fast, it was nonetheless a development of the XS750 triple, a bike whose initially impressive debut quickly paled with a string of mechanical disasters. By the time the 750 became an 850 and then had a cylinder added to make the 1100, the problems were sorted, but the big XS with its shaft drive and huge fuel tank was always seen as long distance big bruiser rather than a road burner, a sumo wrestler rather than an athlete.

Confonted with these two bikes in a dealer’s showroom back in the early 80s, the choice for the punter was a tough one: Italian exotica with a jaw-dropping pose value or Japanese four-cylinder solidity?