THE MYSTERY BIKE. THE RS CUBE THAT NEVER RAN.
By the end of the 2004 championship, the newest version of the RS Cube, scheduled to debut in 2005, had covered some miles on the track, but still in great secrecy.
Marcellino Lucchi, the test driver, and Jeremy McWilliams, one of the two factory drivers, had tried it in the summer. But no one had talked about it in public. It was much more than an evolution of the design. It was in fact a completely new bike, that is, redesigned in every part. And it was a gamble, that is, the redemption attempt that the racing department had been preparing for three years.
The new Cube had cost three years of effort and investment, so there were high expectations. Instead, it never ran. Neither in 2005, nor afterwards. In fact it disappeared, because the whole MotoGP project was stopped suddenly.
It has always been black. That is, carbon black. The few times it came out of Noale it rode on the track in black livery, free of sponsor marks, and so it has remained. At the company, the Cube that never raced is called various things: “the 2005,” the “5,” “the black one.” In any case, it is the missing piece of the puzzle, in the sense that it gives completeness to the Cube project.
The outside world has seen only 3 versions of the Cube-the 2002, 2003, and 2004-but missed just the first real evolution, namely the 2005. A completely redesigned motorcycle. The solutions and ideas gathered over three years of extremely hard and frustrating work were applied to it, a period in which every attempt to make the Cube manageable was in vain. The 2005 looked like it could turn the project around, but no one could verify it. The bike was withdrawn at the end of November 2004. Exactly the time when rumors of Aprilia’s purchase by the Piaggio Group became a true story.
The 2005 Cube has ridden a few times privately and only once with the others: it happened from November 24 to 26, 2004 during the last collegiate test of MotoGP, in Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia. And those were precisely the days when bankers and managers in Italy were deciding together with the unions the fate of the company and thus also the fate of the racing department and Cube. In Andalusia, the 2005 Cube was not very fast, but the team was not looking for sensation times as much as a first set of answers about the effectiveness of the innovations introduced. There were so many, the new features, that it was a completely new bike compared to the version that had just finished the championship. First and foremost, the test rider, Marcellino Lucchi, took it to the track, alternating with the factory riders, Shane Byrne and Jeremy McWilliams. Checks covered set-up, chassis geometries, rear suspension performance, and engine mappings. Byrne was not in optimal physical condition due to recent injuries, instead McWilliams did comparison work together with Lucchi: because McWilliams had already tested the prototype at the end of June, in its very first version.
The 2005 Cube rode many laps without showing any sags or problems, and in the end the riders’ reviews were encouraging. “I’m not in the best condition to push yet, however, the new Cube felt like a definite step forward right away,” Byrne said. “It is more stable and less tiring to handle than the 2004 version.” “This bike has already grown a lot from when I first tested it earlier this summer,” McWilliams explained. “It has improved overall in every aspect, not much like the bike we used in the race this year. The chassis part and the engine seem to me to be a big step forward, but the work is not finished-there is still a lot to do to improve the delivery. But we are already in a different kind of project, and that’s a good thing.”
Instead, the development work ended there. And in spite of the statements McWilliams was fully aware of the situation, since in the two days prior to the test with the new Cube he had been riding an unreleased KR equipped with a V4 engine made by KTM (but that project did not go through either). In those days in Andalusia, a bad air was blowing in the Aprilia box, because rumors had reached as far as Jerez that the Aprilia team was no longer certain to participate in the 2005 championship. Indeed, the bad omens were more than just rumors. Aprilia was about to be bought by the Piaggio Group, which was in fact bailing it out given its very precarious financial condition, and the group’s top management immediately made its opinion about racing known. In those days came a statement from Piaggio Group CEO Rocco Sabelli that sounded like a sentence: “We are maturing the decision to exit as Aprilia from MotoGP: it is an uneconomic championship and not justifiable for the return of image. The Piaggio group will continue to be present in the Grand Prix with Derbi and Gilera, with two important teams in 125 and 250. Those programs also cost a lot, but we will maintain them. And we will remain, again in 125 and 250, also as Aprilia.”
Rocco Sabelli made a revelation, however: “Work is being done to return with the Aprilia brand to Superbike, in an official form.” So, as soon as it returned to Noale, the brand new RS Cube was stored in a corner of the racing department where it is still jealously guarded today. It is not on display at the company’s entrance, as is the case with all the other models that have raced, but it has certainly not been abandoned: it only takes a few minutes to retrieve it, provided its hiding place is known and if, of course, approval comes from the top of the racing department. But in seeing it today, the 2005 provides two mixed feelings: on the one hand it elicits smiles and admiration, on the other it instills sadness.
Paolo Bonora feels the same way: “To be honest, after the end of the 2004 championship we expected it. In fact, I remember that in those days, even when the tests were held in Jerez, there was a great sadness and a lot of melancholy.” A new period was about to begin, however, in which the company reorganized, and the racing department benefited as well. If the successes with the “two-stroke” continued, if the RSV4 arrived, and if the MotoGP project was finally reactivated, it was due to Aprilia’s entry into the Piaggio Group.