Moto Guzzi The Clan
HISTORY

Brembo e Moto Guzzi: The Italian Connection

If we were to pick a film to describe the beginning of the collaboration between Moto Guzzi and Brembo, it would be a quintessentially Italian detective story from the 1970s, set in a Milan populated by small utilitarian cars and starring our two protagonists armed with revolvers, Ray-Bans, and thick moustaches, fighting the crime of poor braking astride their Moto Guzzi bikes.

We love telling stories of Italian success, and when they are as enduring and intertwined with our national pride as this one, it’s easy to get carried away by emotions. Forgive us. However, we can’t underscore the Eagle’s role in making brake discs and braking systems in general synonymous with Brembo: their fateful meeting in the early ‘70s opened the door to almost 50 years of relationship.
But let’s take a step back to recount the origins of Brembo. 

THE BIRTH OF BREMBO
While in 1961 Moto Guzzi already had 40 years of production and international successes behind it, Brembo – which at the time was called OMdS (Officina Meccanica di Sombreno di Breda e Bombassei) – was only a small workshop that had just been opened a few kilometers from Bergamo, in northern Italy, by Emilio Bombassei and his brother-in-law, which specialized in contract work with customers like Alfa Romeo and Pirelli.

The first turning point came in 1964, in the automotive field. Legend has it that a truck from the UK loaded with brake discs for Alfa Romeo had overturned, and Alfa Romeo asked OMdS to repair the components. The owners of the company – which would soon change its name to Brembo – realized that the British brake discs “weren’t very sophisticated” and proposed their own direct production to Alfa Romeo.
In the late 60s, Brembo expanded and began to supply brake discs for trams, buses, earth-moving machinery and cable cars. In 1970 came the first Brembo patent: a new brake pad mounting system that kept the pads attached to the pistons of the caliper to avoid contact with the disc after braking. Brembo now only needed to break into the motorcycle sector, and this is where Moto Guzzi came in.

IT ALL STARTED FROM THE V7 SPORT
In 1971 Moto Guzzi was in the midst of a major design and production whirlwind, and in the wake of the 19 speed records set with the V7 750 prototypes in 1969, it introduced the V7 Sport, to this day one of the most iconic and beloved Mandello Eagles ever. It was incredibly fast – the first production bike to really exceed 200 km/h – powerful and with road holding that immediately became legendary. The “formidable V7” – as it was called in the Guzzi advertisements of the era – was the perfect bike to reawaken the racing spirit of Guzzi enthusiasts after the retirement from the 1957 World Speed Championship. It had, however, one defect compared to its competitors: it didn’t brake well.
Just a few years before, the super-sporty large double-cam drum with four 220-mm jaws on the front represented the state of the art, but the revolution of the brake discs that started in the Far East (the Japanese manufacturers were the first to fit them on their standard models) forever changed the game and raised the bar of performance, clearly demonstrating the superior features of the disc in terms of braking power and resistance to stress.

Moto Guzzi had just the solution to this problem

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