Five senses plus one.
Mind you, it takes a good nose too – to judge the “exhaust gas quality, to know whether the carburettor is running either too rich or too lean.” Taste? Definitely not, because “you can’t exactly go tasting the oil.” Sight goes without saying, of course, because “when I was a boy and saw that Yamaha scooter my dad had to tune for the first time, I went crazy with excitement.”
Every sense plays its part, but the ear is sheer magic. You need it to hear how the roar builds as the revs rise. A mechanic is much like an orchestral conductor, tuning the machine bit by bit, adjusting jets and timing, adding a little here, trimming a little there.
Our chat with Andrea Malossi opens with an impassioned discourse on the symphony of the carburettor. For over twenty years as the CEO of Malossi Spa, he heads up a cutting-edge R&D department he built himself – piece by piece, skill by skill, from materials engineering to precision mechanics.
His passion was forged in the family workshop back in primary school, when he first started stripping old carburettors with meticulous care to salvage spare parts. That drive grew right alongside the business. There’s a real spark there – you can see it in his eyes as they light up when he speaks, and in the way the company has carved out its place in the market. It’s driven by a singular mindset: leave (almost) no stone unturned to win over an ever-expanding audience – especially the most demanding fans, the ones who sometimes know nearly as much as you do.
“Yes,” confirms Andrea, “that’s exactly how it works.” Today’s vast product catalogue was built by holding on by our fingernails to the evolution first of the moped, then the automatic scooter, and eventually the maxi-scooter – consistently pushing beyond OEM performance every step of the way.
Driven by a healthy fear of falling behind – and guided by sharp instinct – Malossi has never lost momentum. We’ve kept the revs high in R&D, powering sales forward in the process.
It’s been a story of constant, smooth, and linear growth, so much so that it’s hard to pinpoint dark times, wrong turns, or missed junctions. There was that one time we decided to dive into the pit bike market – tiny fun-focused bikes that are virtually extinct today – which never quite took off. Interest was surprisingly high, but sales lacked any real torque. Then there was the aborted attempt to build a bike completely from scratch: a few prototypes were made before we realised – this time very quickly – that it wasn’t our calling, nor was it worth the detour.
It’s moments like these that prove Malossi has a crystal-clear vision, steered by an intuition that, while innate, is honed through pure passion and grit. To keep your dreams alive, management has learned to master the ride: knowing when to lean into a corner, when to grab a handful of brake, where to open the throttle, and exactly where to point the handlebars.
