Here's the story I wrote and edited for CityBike in 2009:
2009 Moto Guzzi Griso 8v
First Impression: Mr. Editor
Griso is the cruel, cudgel-wielding thug in Alessandro Manzoni’s 19th-century novel The Betrothed. We can imagine him big and blocky, maybe lacking any trace of a neck between his beefy shoulders and giant, bullet-shaped head. He’s fiercely loyal to his evil boss, but he’s not all business. When asked to kidnap the heroine and bring her to the villan unharmed, he replies, “Signor, I could not pluck a flower from its stalk, and bring it to your lordship, without touching it a little. But I will do no more than is necessary.”
Tough, purposeful, brutal, but fun. How could Moto Guzzi name the tough-looking Griso 8v anything else? It’s based on the Griso 1100, which in turn was based on a concept bike first shown in Milan in 2003, a “techno-custom,” Guzzi’s take on a modern power cruiser. Two important features of this chassis: a big, tube-steel perimeter frame joined to Guzzi’s CARC parallelogram single-sided swingarm, which reduces the up-and-down jacking effect of the shaft final drive. The original Guzzi used the two-valve, air-cooled, 1064cc transverse V-Twin from the Breva, which, with 88 hp and 65 ft-lbs. of torque was pretty burly for a air-cooled, pushrod V-Twin.
“Ha,” said some lunatic in the Piaggio/Aprilia/Moto Guzzi product planning department, “You call that a power cruiser? When we have this pile of eight-valve motors?” A motor that, sporting a new cylinder-head design (with an overhead cam and cam chain instead of pushrods), new oiling system, new crank bearings and other changes, makes a claimed 110 hp and 80 ft-lbs. of torque. Yow! That’s a spicy air-cooled 1151cc V-Twin meatball.
It’s a big meatball, too. But Guzzis are big bikes, for big, greasy, bullet-headed guys. Claimed dry weight is 489 pounds, and the wheelbase is 61.2 inches: long and heavy for a sportbike, short and light for a cruiser. The wheels get good sport-touring Metzler rubber, brakes are fine radial-mount Brembo stuff, and suspension is fully adjustable all around. It’s big, but small, villainous men like me can comfortably mount and put feet flat on the ground, too. Reach to the bar is very nice and natural, if the pegs are a little close to the seat.
Riding the bike is more fun then you should have on a cruiser. The motor is a sweet one, everything a Guzzi is supposed to be: richly torquey, smooth, full of character. At illegal cruising speeds, it feels like it’s just off idle, but even in sixth gear, there’s plenty of passing power available. In fact, it feels stronger, smoother and more responsive than any other sport-oriented air-cooled motor I’ve ridden: sorry Ducati, H-D and BMW.
Handling is nice as well, although you’ll never mistake it for a sportbike. You know those “stable in high-speed sweepers, heavy-feeling in the tight stuff” clichés about classic Italian bikes, right? Griso lives up to that, but with the right combo of muscles and balls you can really hustle this bike along, thanks to that CARC swingarm and ample cornering clearance. The radial-mount four-piston Brembo brakes are nice and strong, although they can’t mask the bike’s weight under braking. The fully adjustable suspension, once fully adjusted, offers great ride quality, compliant yet controlled.
Guzzis are great touring machines, and Griso is no exception. The seat is comfortable and it just ticks along in sixth gear with little unpleasant vibration reaching the rider. There’s no wind protection, but the comfortably forward lean sets you into the wind, and with a tall tank bag strapped to the plastic tank I didn’t feel too wind-blown, even after a 220-mile morning ride back from the Sierras. And although there are nice bungee points on the tail section, I do wish the small passenger seat provided a more stable platform for a tail bag, as the high pipe eschews saddlebags. My older brother probably wishes for that even more, as it was his tent that slid off the tail and got shredded by the rear tire. That’ll teach him to loan out his stuff.
At $14,290, the Griso 8v is priced about what you’d expect for a big European Twin with high quality brakes and suspension like this. Build quality is outstanding, and reliability shouldn’t be an issue, so long as the bike is properly maintained, and there are no shortages of Guzzi dealers in California. Of course all the old Guzzi drawbacks Tough, loyal, strong, but with a wicked sense of humor and high fun factor: Griso rides again.
Second Opinion: Yossef Schvetz
How much powa’ do you really need to put on a good street fight? One-Hundred-Ten claimed horsies sounds like a sizable herd for inner-city showdowns and at least by the spec sheet, this Guzzi Griso should be able to give an air cooled Monster 1100 or Buell XB12 a good run for the money. Or does it? The guys from Mandello always did their thing differently. Part naked standard, part power cruiser, Griso has escaped pigeonholing with its neither-here, neither-there attitude.
It’s a good thing that the Griso had this bagful of ready excuses as our first days together weren’t idyllic. Being new to San Fran, girlfriend Lorella and I hopped on the Goose’s flattish saddle and set out to ride the 49-Mile scenic drive around town. Great sights: you have the luck of living in a heck of a beautiful town. Too bad the Goose wasn’t really making my tour easy: something was amiss with the fueling or ignition. The bike bucked and kicked, needing lots of revs to pull cleanly; not the throttle response I remembered from my first ride on this bike at the launch near Lake Como. Could it be that the noisy accessory Termignioni end can requires a different injection map? The strange and constant need to keep the motor “on the boil,” two-stroke style, was compounded by the heavy clutch lever. In stop-and-go traffic I had to keep the lever constantly feathered if I don’t want to dump my dear one behind me (she’s already complaining about the lack of grabrails), and by the time we reached Sutro Heights I’m hating life and am afraid of catching a severe case of left hand tendonitis. Not that I was planning any streetfighting scenes aboard the Goose with my girlfriend on the back, but this first test of the urban warrior qualities hasn’t been that successful. Maybe the Griso will fare better in less constraining scenarios?
Indeed, CB’s editor invites me for a spirited ride up the coast with some fast company. The shredded supersport tires on a variety of super-sporting weapons that I see in our early morning meeting spot is a bit worrying. I cast a look at the Metzeler Z6 Roadtecs of the Griso and note its slightly porky dimensions and am not sure this is going to be too much fun either. Gabe says, “do your own pace, you’ll be fine.” Sure enough, the Griso and me are okay-ish up to a 9/10ths pace but as soon as this bunch of go-fast-guys pumps up the volume to warp speed, I discover that this is not the kind of “streetfighting” that the Guzzi shines at either and that plentitude of blind turns around this racetra…oops, sorry, public road, means that it’s going to end in tears. Just miss a downshifts and the Griso’s rear steps out while making worrying ta-ta-ta noises. I back off a bit and let the Griso set up its own semi-quick pace.
I am a Guzzista, with a Le Mans III that I love, but the need to constantly rev the guts out of the motor is testing my ardor. Turns out the valve cover had been off recently, could the spark plug cap been dislodged? Yes, it was! The threaded end of high voltage cable was unscrewed and after some fiddling, the Griso’s engine smooths out. While I am at it, I back the shock’s compression damping to minimum.
Funny how chasing out a gremlin can transform a bike. Now the Griso delivered a steady flow of horses and throttle response was snappy, especially above 5000 rpm. Guzzis of yore might have been famous for their low-down pulling power but this otto valvole thing is a whole other world. The top-end power hit is so strong you suspect there are way more than 110 horsies. With the power delivery sorted, calm boulevard cruising becomes a joy and when some punk challenges you at a stop light, the Griso delivers amazing acceleration. Quite a few big-cube V-Twin boys were left wondering what hit them. And with the rear damping softened, the back end is much more forgiving, even if it still kicks a bit over sharpish bumps.
Still, the Griso is no streefighter. While trying to pull my usual stupid trick of locking the rear tire 100 yards before a stoplight, the heavy cast swingarm complains and the thing gets all out of shape. Don’t try any supermoto-style pivot turns, either. But we headed south to route 35 and discovered to our mutual amusement that the Goose loved the fast sweepers leading to Alice’s as much as it did being admired in the parking lot outside the restaurant. The Griso could be fine for long semi sporting days on the saddle, even two up, if it wasn’t for the low seat height that cramped my legs after 40 or 50 minutes.
The Griso eluded classification back at that Milan show and it still does. It’s not just the original sport-custom angle of the tasteful design details that sets it apart. It’s really a weird and wonderful creature inside out, and as such is far from being perfect, but therein lies the charm: It's unlike anything else out there. I dare guessing that life with it will be not a love or hate affair but rather a love and hate one. But as such, isn’t it the perfect tool for all of us who hate stooping in front of marketing-led formulas? Not a bad thing in our age of pre-manufactured dreams. I love it. I hate it. I could want one. Isn’t indecision wonderful?
Yossef Schvetz is a moto-journalist and industrial designer who lives in Milan and occasionally slums it in S.F.
Third Take: Craig Bessenger
As the owner of a BMW R1200GS, I’m taking a philosophical view of my recent ride on City Bike’s Griso 1200. If life can fairly be characterized as the process of coming to grips with shortcomings and disappointment, then my time on the Griso is just another step down the road of this delightful existence. The disappointment here, unfortunately, is with the bike I own, not with the bike that I now want to own thanks to my test ride. Damn you, City Bike.
What I knew before riding the Griso, my first ever spin on a Moto Guzzi, was that Guzzis are supposed to be weird. That’s the biggest surprise with the Griso. This is not a quirky bike. It starts with the motor. It’s torquey on the bottom half of the rev range, but above 6000 rpm or so it makes an unexpected, addictive rush all the way to redline that the R1200GS can’t match.
To be fair, the motor felt a little soft in the midrange and I would have guessed that the BMW is a bit stouter low down. I’ve since seen dyno charts for the Griso 1200 that show a dip in torque from 4500 to 5500 rpm. The online tech gurus are apparently just waiting for Dynojet to come out with a dedicated Power Commander to fix this. The folks behind
www.GuzziTech.com are leading the charge on this front; check in there for details.
In my post-ride research, I’ve also heard some complaints about fuel-injection jerkiness with the Griso 1200, but I had no problems lugging the bike down to 3000 rpm or so and then having it pull smoothly all the way through to the rev limiter. Our ride took us down unfamiliar, curvy, and damp roads, so smooth throttle uptake was especially appreciated. Again, I thought the Griso's fueling was superior to my (stock) GS. The Griso did have the official Guzzi accessory Termignoni pipe fitted, which opens the bike up a bit even with the removable baffle in place. I don’t know whether our test bike had the optional “off-road only” fuel-injection map installed, but that might explain its clean fueling.
It isn’t just the motor that’s great. The riding position felt pretty comfortable for me at six foot, two inches. The pegs are slightly rearset, but my legs never felt cramped and I had no trouble shifting, even though I was wearing Aerostich Combat Touring Boots. More than that, riding the Griso almost immediately felt natural to me and I didn’t need to consciously think about any of the control interfaces.
I had my doubts about the bike’s handling, just given its wheelbase, but it took on unfamiliar roads ridden at a quick pace with ease. Turn initiation was fairly light and the Griso had no trouble changing direction through switchbacks or diving a little deeper into a corner as it tightened up. The suspension felt firm but not harsh, with no wallowing through corners.
Finally, unlike some other roadsters, the Griso has real all-rounder ability. Moto Guzzi has a couple of different windscreens available (the taller version isn’t available in the U.S. and has to be ordered from shops in Europe), two different tank bags, semi-rigid panniers with fairly unobtrusive racks, and a tail rack with dedicated bag.
Any complaints? Well, the sidestand. If you’re sitting in the saddle and stick your left leg straight forward, parallel to the ground, and then sort of twist your body to get an extra few inches of extension, then you will almost be able to reach the sidestand. That’s really it. And if you’re kvetching about a sidestand…
So a word of warning to owners of late-model BMW R-bikes: do not ride the Griso or the Stelvio (Guzzi’s adventure bike) or any other Moto Guzzi with the new 8-valve engine unless you are ready to be confronted with an air and oil-cooled twin-cylinder motor that makes the latest BMW twin feel slow by comparison.
For that matter, anyone in the market for a Ducati Monster or a Triumph Speed Triple or the like should try the Griso before they make a purchase. It’s not going to compete on pure numbers with those bikes, but it really is that satisfying to ride. The Bay Area is lucky enough to be full of Moto Guzzi dealers (San Francisco, San Rafael, San Jose, Sacramento, Santa Cruz). Take a ride, see for yourself.
Craig Bessenger is a contributor and Editor Emeritus of City Bike.
There ain't a whole lotta dealers around once you leave the Bay Area or more populated metropolitan areas. The guys I know that ride Guzzis all do there own maintenance and repairs. I've never ridden one but I would love too.
. OP, if you got the green, go for it. Anything from Japan is boring imo. Be different, have fun!
