Benelli Spare Parts

Benelli has always been a little bit awkward, and that’s exactly why it’s worth talking about. While other Italian marques lined up neatly with their brand identities — Ducati the racer, Moto Guzzi the oddball, Vespa the fashion icon — Benelli sat in a drafty corner of Pesaro doing a bit of everything:

race bikes, commuters, six-cylinder exotica, chunky adventure tourers and, more recently, budget-friendly middleweights that seem to be parked on every European street corner. Somehow, against the odds, Benelli has managed to be both legendary and underdog at the same time.

It started over a century ago, back in 1911, when the Benelli brothers opened a small garage in Pesaro. At first they were repairing bicycles and making spare parts. Then came engines. Then, inevitably, they thought, “why don’t we bolt one of these to a frame and see what happens?” Italian history is basically a long list of people saying that and accidentally creating icons. By the 1930s, Benelli motorcycles were howling around European race circuits, green and gold tanks flashing by with a tiny lion on the badge and a very non-tiny noise from the exhaust.

Racing gave Benelli a certain swagger, but it was the post-war years that really embedded the brand in everyday life. While the country rebuilt, Benelli singles and small twins became workhorses: bikes for getting to factories, farms and seaside towns rather than just finish lines.

They were never quite as numerous as some rivals, but they had a toughness that suited rough roads and thin wallets. Somewhere between practicality and passion, Benelli found its lane — and predictably, it refused to stay in it.

Because then came the moment everyone remembers: the Benelli Sei. In the 1970s, when four cylinders were still something to boast about, Benelli decided that was simply not enough and built a six. The 750 Sei arrived with three chrome silencers stacked neatly on each side and an engine that looked like someone had welded two Japanese fours together and filed the serial numbers off. It wasn’t the fastest bike on the planet, and it wasn’t the lightest, but it had theatre. You didn’t buy a Sei to quietly commute. You bought it because you wanted to stand next to it in a car park and pretend you were in a period magazine advert.

The Sei summed up Benelli perfectly: bold, a bit mad, slightly out of sync with the mainstream and absolutely unforgettable. And, of course, it helped bankrupt them. Like many European brands of the era, Benelli found itself squeezed between cheap Japanese reliability on one side and the spiralling cost of trying to match it with handmade Italian technology on the other.

Financial trouble came in waves. Ownership changed hands. Production stuttered. Whole decades for Benelli fans are remembered more for rumours and hope than actual new bikes.

But every time the lights seemed to go out in Pesaro, someone found the switch again. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Benelli re-emerged with something nobody expected: the Tornado Tre 900. In a world full of safe, wind-tunnel-approved superbikes, the Tornado looked like it had escaped from a sketchbook. The radiator was under the seat, with twin cooling fans peering out of the tail like jet intakes. The triple-cylinder engine snarled, the chassis was sharp, and the whole thing felt like a passion project that accidentally made it into production. It wasn’t perfect, but it was vivid, and that’s always been Benelli’s real currency.

The TNT roadster that followed turned the volume up even further. All exposed trellis, angry bodywork and a name that sounded like a warning label, it was not designed for shy people. Park a TNT outside a café and you didn’t need to tell anyone which bike was yours — they could work it out from the grin and the ringing in your ears. Again, it was flawed, a bit hot-blooded in daily use, but it fit the marque’s tradition: better to be interesting than invisible.

The modern chapter of Benelli’s story is stranger and, in its own way, even more impressive. Under Chinese ownership (QJ / Qianjiang), many assumed the name would simply be slapped on generic commuters and that would be that. Instead, something more nuanced happened. The brand began turning out middleweight machines that were solid, affordable and — crucially — still recognisably Benelli. The TRK 502 quietly became one of Europe’s best-selling adventure-style bikes. The Leoncino revived an old name with neat retro-scrambler styling. These weren’t fragile exotics; they were honest, everyday bikes you might see covered in bug splats and cheap luggage, doing exactly what early Benellis had done half a century before.

Purists sometimes wrinkle their noses at this era, insisting the “real” Benellis ended with the last Italian-built triples. But there’s a certain poetry in seeing the lion badge back to its original task: moving ordinary people around on functional, slightly quirky machines. The proportions might not be as delicate as a 1960s racer, the romance a little more diluted by practicality, but the core idea hasn’t changed: build something with character that doesn’t cost a small house deposit.

What makes Benelli special isn’t a single model or race win; it’s the way the whole story refuses to line up neatly. This is a company that has gone bankrupt, been resurrected, built a six-cylinder superbike, a three-cylinder oddball, workaday singles, budget adventure bikes and more. It has survived fashion, mismanagement and shifting continents. And somehow, the name still means something when you see it stamped into the side of a tank.

Walk past a row of parked bikes and a Benelli will always catch your eye, even if you can’t

immediately explain why. Maybe it’s the slightly offbeat stance, the way the details never feel

entirely generic, or just the sense that someone, somewhere in the design process cared more

about making something memorable than making something safe. A Benelli isn’t the obvious

choice. That’s kind of the point.