Owning a modern retro bike like the Benelli Imperiale 400 actually puts you in a pretty unique position. It is easy to look at old Italian machinery through rose-colored glasses, but the reality of owning a 1970s Italian classic usually involves tracking down extinct ignition components, dealing with fragile wiring, and oiling your garage floor more than riding. The Imperiale gives you that authentic, heavy-flywheel, air-cooled single-cylinder rumble—reminiscent of the historic MotoBi and Benelli utility roadsters—but with modern fueling and reliability. You get to actually ride yours, while the owners of the ultimate classic Benellis are often terrified to take them out of climate-controlled storage.

It is easy to lose yourself dreaming of six-cylinder symphonies and racing prototypes locked behind museum glass. But there is a profound truth in motorcycling: a machine you can actually kick into life on a Sunday morning will always out-ride a ghost you can only admire from afar.

But there is a completely different side to Benelli’s history. It is a legacy defined by absolute mechanical audacity, born from moments when the factory decided to stop making sensible commuter bikes and instead reach straight for the stars.

If you want to look up at the absolute peak of Benelli’s wildest, most exotic masterpieces, these five mythical machines are the ultimate poster bikes—engineering marvels that most of us can only dream of experiencing.

Touching the Stars: Five Mythical Classic Benellis We Can Only Dream Of Riding

When most motorcyclists think of vintage Italian hardware, names like Ducati or Moto Guzzi dominate the conversation. But Benelli, founded in Pesaro all the way back in 1911, has a historical catalog that is far more unhinged.

While the brand built its financial foundation on elegant, hardworking singles, its racing and supercar-era history is littered with mythical engineering projects designed with zero compromise. These five machines represent Benelli at its most ambitious, expensive, and legendary—the kind of bikes that belong more to motorsport lore and museum collections than standard asphalt.

1. The Benelli 750 Sei (1974–1978)

In the early 1970s, the Japanese “Big Four” were completely dominant, leaving European manufacturers scrambling. Enter Alejandro de Tomaso, the automotive tycoon behind the famous De Tomaso Pantera supercar. He bought Benelli with a singular, aggressive goal: outdo the Japanese at their own game. To do it, he greenlit the development of the world’s first production six-cylinder motorcycle.

Engineers famously used the architecture of the ultra-reliable Honda CB500 inline-four as a starting point, stretching it out by adding two extra cylinders. To keep the massive engine from being impossibly wide across the rider’s knees, Benelli cleverly moved the alternator from the end of the crankshaft to a position hidden right behind the cylinders.

Draped in sharp, angular bodywork designed by Paolo Martin at Carrozzeria Ghia, the 750 Sei was a visual shock to a market used to soft, round lines. But the true masterpiece was the view from the rear: six independent, screaming chrome exhaust pipes. It didn’t sound like a standard motorcycle; it wailed like an early Formula 1 car. With only around 3,200 ever built, finding one today requires a massive premium and a dedicated specialist to keep those three Dell’Orto carburetors perfectly synced.

2. The Benelli 900 Sei (1979–1989)

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, Honda fired back with its own six-cylinder monster, the CBX. Benelli’s response was to evolve the Sei into something far more exclusive and aggressive. They increased both the bore and stroke to bring the displacement up to 906cc, traded the delicate six-pipe exhaust for a muscular six-into-two system, and added a dry clutch.

Because De Tomaso owned both Benelli and Moto Guzzi at the time, the 900 Sei borrowed the sharp bikini fairing from the iconic Guzzi Le Mans and utilized Moto Guzzi’s integrated, linked braking system. It was wide, heavy, and put out a massive 80 horsepower.

Motorcycle journalists at the time literally coined the term “flashbike” to describe it: a category reserved for machines that were rare, expensive, European, highly temperamental, and unapologetically fast. Fewer than 2,000 left the factory over a ten-year span, making it an incredibly rare ghost on modern roads.

3. The 250cc Four-Cylinder GP Racer (1968–1969)

Long before the multi-cylinder street bikes of the seventies, Benelli was a terrifying force on the international Grand Prix circuits. By the late 1960s, the lightweight racing classes were being completely overrun by smoking, ultra-lightweight Japanese two-stroke engines. While other European brands gave up, Benelli doubled down on four-stroke engineering, creating a miniature mechanical marvel: a 246cc inline-four racing engine.

Building an inline-four with a tiny 250cc total displacement meant the internal components were almost jewel-like in size. The cylinder head featured four microscopic valves per cylinder, and the power was fed through a complex eight-speed gearbox.

This mechanical symphony revved all the way to an astronomical 16,000 RPM, producing 50 horsepower. In 1969, Australian racing legend Kel Carruthers stepped in to ride this exact high-revving four-cylinder, capturing the 250cc World Championship and winning the legendary Isle of Man TT. These were pure factory-backed prototypes, and the surviving examples are safely locked behind glass in elite museums and private estate collections.

4. The Benelli Tornado 650 (1970–1975)

Before De Tomaso pushed the brand into six-cylinder territory, Benelli tried to capture the lucrative American export market by building a direct competitor to the British parallel twins of the era. The result was the Tornado 650, engineered by racing mind Piero Prampolini.

Prampolini was obsessed with eliminating the chronic oil leaks that plagued British twins, so he designed the Tornado with horizontally split crankcases and minimal external oil lines. The engine was radically “over-square” (a very wide 84mm bore paired with a short 58mm stroke), meaning it could rev incredibly fast for a big twin, pushing past 7,400 RPM with ease.

The bike has a fascinating Hollywood connection: Steve McQueen was the US ambassador and importer face for Benelli in the late 60s. He extensively tested early prototypes of the 650 twin and famously suggested that the heavy, powerful motor needed a stiffer, Metisse-style chassis to handle properly. Taking that feedback seriously, Luigi Benelli designed a massive, ultra-rigid duplex cradle frame specifically for the production models. Despite its brilliant handling and smooth power, it arrived just as the four-cylinder boom took over the world, leaving it a rare, cult-classic heavyweight.

5. The Post-WWII Military “Scavenger” Conversions (Late 1940s)

To truly appreciate the brand, you have to look past the high-tech superbikes to a moment of sheer human survival. By 1940, Benelli was at the absolute peak of its early success, employing hundreds of workers and engineering a supercharged four-cylinder racer. Then, World War II devastated the region. The factory in Pesaro was completely pulverized by Allied bombing and systematically stripped of its remaining machinery by retreating forces, leaving nothing but literal rubble.

The Benelli brothers refused to let the company die. As the dust settled in 1946 and 1947, they didn’t have the resources to build new engines. Instead, they combed through local battlefields, mechanical junkyards, and abandoned military camps. They scavenged roughly 1,000 ruined, war-torn military motorcycles—mostly of British origin left behind by Allied forces.

They brought this battlefield surplus back to the ruins of their sheds, completely stripped them down, re-engineered the frames, and remanufactured them into reliable, civilian transport to get a rebuilding Italy back on its feet. These post-war hybrids represent the absolute soul of the brand—a masterclass in grit and mechanical resourcefulness before the company ever rose to chase the stars again.

The View from the Saddle of an Imperiale

Chasing after a garage queen like a 750 Sei is a romantic thought, but there is a profound joy in having an approachable, real-world connection to that heritage. Your Imperiale 400 is a direct nod to the classic lightweight singles that Benelli built during its post-war resurgence—the very bikes that kept the lights on in Pesaro so the engineers could dream up six-cylinder wildness in the first place.