ADRIAN MORTON RENAISSANCE MAN
It’s a dull winter’s day in San Marino but Adrian Morton is in good spirits. He takes his laptop to the window to demonstrate his office’s spectacular view towards Rimini and the Adriatic Sea (we’re talking via Zoom, obviously), then pulls out his phone to send me an image that he remembers being inspired by as a design student at London’s Royal College of Art, more than 25 years ago.
It’s a Honda concept sketch, showing three futuristic racebikes lined up on a grid, below a circuit grandstand graphic displaying the then far-off date to be 2020. The bikes are swoopy and fully enclosed, with balloon tyres, forkless front ends and hydraulic front-wheel drive. Morton’s point is that 2020 is now in the past, yet those concept bikes seem as futuristic as ever.
“What were the ingredients to create a motorcycle in 1995, when I began my career?” he says. “An internal combustion engine, trellis frame, front forks, single-sided swing-arm and some crude electronics. Okay, so now we’re 25 years on from there. And the recipe for an MV Agusta is a trellis frame, forks at the front, single-sided swing-arm, some slightly more advanced electronics and a combustion engine. So what the hell has happened in 25 years?”
By contrast Morton himself has come a long way since he was a student in London, having ridden his Honda Benly 200 from his Norwich home. Now aged 50,
