It looks like a bomb. Big, round front, tapering to the rear, tailfins. Made to cut through the air on the flat, in this case, rather than falling from the sky. Feel free to wear your cowboy hat when riding either one if you like to live dangerously, of course. Photo from The Vintagent.
Late 1940s styling was sleek and detailed, drastically futuristic compared to the decade before. The war was over, a new world was beginning, and military function could be replaced with stylish form. The 1947 Moto Major 350 came out of that, looking nothing like a military motorcycle from just a few years prior.
I’ll never be a motorcycle guy. If I lived somewhere with less wind, fewer big trucks, and fewer people playing on their phones, I might consider it. Combine all of those things as risk factors, and the insurance on a motorcycle rises to an absolutely insane price. All that aside, I’m glad many don’t think that way, as it’s still rare not to see a motorcycle out on a nice day. Aside from a few customs that are rarely built to ride, nothing out there looks like the Moto Major 350. Developed by the motorcycle division of Fiat, it was said to have a twin-cylinder 350cc engine, but the prototype was only equipped with a single-cylinder 350cc engine. Both engines were liquid-cooled via two radiators hidden inside the fairing. The engine is mounted longitudinally with a shaft drive, which I’ve always found odd looking, but with a fairing like this, all that is hidden. Even the handlebars are mostly integrated, mounted low, and meeting under the fairing through a slot on each side. The body fades down to the rear, and a fishtail exhaust pipe is high-mounted on each side of the fairing, though on the single-cylinder prototype, only one side was functional. Probably the coolest part was the suspension. On the low-slung, tight-fitting frame and fairing, there was no room for a conventional suspension. Instead, elastic wheels were utilized, where the rim could move independently of the hub with a flexible material between them. I like the idea of this from a weight and aerodynamic perspective, and the designers also managed to make it look really good in this instance, but I wonder what it would be like in real-world testing. After a bit of wear, the vertical travel will likely loosen, but what about the horizontal movement? Any wear laterally could result in a wobble, feeling like a flat tire or a failed bearing. It doesn’t matter much, as they only ever built the prototype, and today it lives life in non-running condition in a museum. That doesn’t make it any less awesome, though.
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