The ‘SB’ stood for Suzuki/Bimota. It signalled Bimota’s standard practice of incorporating other marques’ engines into its own bespoke chassis. In the case of the SB2, power was provided by the Suzuki GS750. The 8-valve inline-four motor peaked at 68bhp. That gave the the SB2 a top speed of 130mph. Credit was also due to its slippery lines. A dry weight of just 440lb sealed the high-speed deal. This was still the Seventies, do not forget.
The driving force behind the SB2 was Massimo Tamburini. He had been a Bimota co-founder. Tamburini fitted the ‘legendary engineer’ bill to a tee. In his time, he had designed chassis for 250 and 350cc World Championship-winning bikes. In ’77, Tamburini tipped his technical brilliance into the new Bimota. It was a gimme, then, that the SB2 would handle as well as it went. Ceriani telescopic forks – and a first-of-its-kind rear monoshock – did the business suspension-wise. They were duly hitched up to a tubular steel space-frame. The monoshock alone separated the SB2 from its rivals … in every sense of the word!
First and foremost, though, a Bimota is about style. As befits a firm from Rimini, Italy. Certainly, the SB2 ran true to form, in that regard. Its bodywork wrote the book on ‘swoopy’. The tank protector/seat was a self-supporting one-piece – which saved the weight of a subframe. That innovation – like the rising-rate rear shock – would subsequently be seen on mass-produced machines. So, Bimota – that consummate special-builder – had done what it did best. In the beguiling form of the SB2, it merged dynamite design and top-drawer technology. Again!