[Nilesh5417]

Its raining Scramblers & Cafe Racers! Here is another pocket rocket that was spotted near ARAI and sure is a a true blue Italian looker! I'm just not sure of its prospects and possibility of a real launch given the pricing / fate of Aprillia RS125 / Cagiva Mito 125. But its truly heartening to know that all kinds of manufacturers are looking at Indian market as a possibility. Or maybe am just too smitten by how this one looks and getting carried away.

News here.

Resurrected Italian small displacement high-performance motorcycle specialist FB Mondial seems to be gearing up to venture into India. An undisguised example of the FB Mondial HPS 125 (HPS stands for Hipster) cafe racer has been spotted near ARAI’s (Automotive Research Association of India) Pune facility, indicating that the homologation process could be on.

Powering the Italian beauty is a 125 cc single-cylinder DOHC liquid-cooled engine which is equipped with electronic fuel injection to produce a healthy 14.7 hp (11 KW) and 12.3 Nm of torque. The motor is paired with a 6-speed transmission.

Here is a bit of info about the brand itself - i didnt know of them until i googled. They currently have 3 products - the Hipster (Cafe Racer), the SMX Enduro & SMX Motard which as expected seem to share the engine & cycle parts. The Enduro & Motard seem to be available only with the 125cc heart but then again, they look like any other motorcycles in that segment. At the risk of sounding harsh, they in fact look like they are bikes from the late 90s & early 2000s.

“Get going again” is the statement that got us, united by a limitless passion for the two wheels, all agree. During the years of inactivity of FB Mondial the lord Pier Luigi Boselli, owner of the brand, and Cesare Galli, holder of Pelpi international (Italian business company founded in 2002), through their friendship and shared passion for bikes, gave birth to an ambitious project. The idea was to “get going again” right from where the brand stopped, keeping and following the principles that once were represented by FB Mondial: technology and aesthetic quality.

In 2014, Boselli and Galli started to lay the foundation of the project, starting to draw the first designs that would become the first motorcycle. Through that first year and all 2015 those sketches became reality and now they’re called Hipster 125 and Hipster 250. Hipster, for FB Mondial, represents its own comeback to the top, closed to the “hipster generation”, that born as Mondial in the 40’s and is coming back fashionable again in the last years. A word that always means a “way of being”, a “lifestyle” that wants to go over institutional standards of its times anticipating the future ones.

FB Mondial won’t stop here with Hipster but it has already planned one short-middle terms program which provides, between 2017 and 2023, the birth of 3 more different bikes. They will be developed with different engines, right to offer one complete range of bikes as the band had in the 60’s and how one brand has to evolve naturally in the market.*****

[vamsi.kona]

The bike looks really good in the second pic. Can be a great debut for the company if they can bring that model and at a reasonable price

[ashwin1224]

The bike sure looks good. And the 125cc looks to be a high revving fun motor on paper as well. We'll have to wait it out to see what price this bike is launched at. From what the internet is telling me, they are still a boutique brand, with only one factory in Italy, so unless they team up with a local business, I do not see them being priced competitively at all. They are still purely Italian though, unlike benelli, so expect all the quirks of an Italian machine. The engine again, has been in use in several other bikes of the Piaggio group, notably in Derbi bikes.

At 130kgs(not sure if dry), 14l fuel capacity, 41mm inverted forks and 4 calliper brakes, the bike screams premium but is our market really ready for a 125cc bike, costing as much as (probably) a KTM 200 or more?