Air is important to the history of Moto Guzzi. For one the founders of the company – Giorgio Parodi Giovanni Ravelli and Carlo Guzzi – met while serving in the Italian Air Corps during World War I. The first two were pilots the company bears the name of the flight mechanic who kept their planes aloft. Moto Guzzi was the first motorcycle maker to use a wind tunnel opened in 1950. The signature Guzzi engine a burly vee-twin in an unusual longitudinal configuration has always been air-cooled its finned cylinders poking out from under the fuel tank like beefy biceps.
But the era of air-cooled motorcycles is drawing to a close. Harley-Davidson and Ducati held fast but they’ve both begun switching their signature vee engines to water cooling. It’s a tricky thing to navigate messing with the hallmark engine you’ve spent decades valorizing. (Just ask Porsche.)
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So when Moto Guzzi set out to turn its heroic vee-twin into a modern water-cooled engine it faced a ridiculous challenge. Thankfully the 2023 Moto Guzzi V100 Mandello S you see here has an air-bending trick up its sleeve.
In piston engines most UHC comes from the fuel that gets squished behind the piston rings or under the seam of the head gasket during the compression stroke. This trapped fuel doesn’t ignite during the combustion stroke and gets released as UHC on the exhaust stroke. (If you’re thinking this must represent an infinitesimal amount of fuel you now understand the challenge of engineering a clean-running internal combustion engine in 2023.)
Liquid cooling helps mitigate this problem in a few ways. Modern engines run cleanest in a narrow operating temperature range. A thermostatically-controlled liquid cooling system can self-adjust to keep the engine running right in its thermodynamic sweet spot no matter the ambient temperature. A water-jacketed engine can also bring coolant to places where airflow would never reach preventing hot spots—or cold spots which can collect unburned fuel—from developing inside the combustion chamber.
Switching to a water-cooled engine made sense to keep Moto Guzzi’s bikes legal in Europe. The pivot also brought performance advantages starting with the cylinder heads. Water cooling made it easier for Moto Guzzi to abandon the old pushrod two-valve design in favor of dual overhead cams and four valves per cylinder. In a four-valve engine the area between the exhaust valves gets absolutely cooked with exhaust heat without sufficient cooling this can create a hot spot prone to metal fatigue and a potential source of pre-ignition.
Thanks to water cooling that four-valve head created yet another UHC-killing benefit: Now Guzzi could eliminate valve overlap where the intake valve opens before the exhaust valve closes. This valve-timing trick harnesses exhaust vacuum to draw more intake charge into the cylinder for better power but has the nasty side effect of sending a little unburned fuel directly into the exhaust system.
That means 30 percent less space for UHCs to hide. Suddenly the cantankerous vee-twin had an advantage—and Guzzi had a reason to pour R&D money into a brand-new water-cooled overhead-cam longitudinally-mounted engine that shares nothing with any of its previous powerplants.
A counter-rotating balance shaft mitigates the other bad Guzzi habit: The roll reaction created by the spinning crankshaft. You still get a gentle nudge to the right as you start the engine or rev it at a standstill to alert you that you’re riding a Guzzi but it’s nothing compared to the lurch you get on older models. Of course there’s one Guzzi quirk that nothing could fix: After a few minutes of riding the heat from the elbows-out engine starts to roast your shins.
The Mandello S comes standard with Öhlins semi-active dampers that adjust in real-time. The dampers and engine management offer four settings—Tour Rain Road and Sport. I mostly left the chassis in Tour and the engine in Sport for a good mix of suspension compliance and engine response.
Over a 300-mile weekend half highway half country roads the V100 Mandello was approachable and immediately comfortable. The riding position is slightly more crouched than an adventure tourer but still upright enough to burn through two tanks back-to-back without getting sore. The 115-hp 77 lb-ft engine will happily pull away even if you’re two gears higher than you should be. I’m a gentle (some might say “timid) rider on the street but the V100 gave me the confidence to brake deeper and lean further in corners after just a few minutes in the saddle.
With electric motorcycles off to an inauspicious start I’m glad to see companies like Guzzi keeping their internal combustion tradition alive. The V100 has enough charming idiosyncrasies to earn the eagle badge while offering the tech and comfort required to lure buyers away from Ducati and BMW. All it took was a little water and air.
