The Goodwood Festival of Speed->ke3879 is a great place to check out new cars and motorcycles that companies are all-too willing to showcase for those attending the event. It’s actually become an auto show of sorts considering that we’ve seen a handful of concept and world debuts at the event in the past few years.

This year’s event, scheduled from June 25 to June 28, 2015, will be no different, at least for the Bienville Legacy, which has been penciled in to make its global public debut at the event.

Considered as one of the most powerful four-cylinder production motorcycles ever built, the Legacy is set to become one of the show-stealers at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. It’s a long time coming for the bike, which actually took over three years to develop under the stewardship of renowned bike designer J.T. Nesbitt and Jim Jacoby and Scott Miller, the two people responsible for funding the development of the bike.

The Legacy is far more than just a concept these days. It’s actually close to production barring any unforeseen circumstances. Needless to say, a bike as special as the Legacy isn’t going to come cheap. So if you’re thinking of placing an order, it’s probably a good idea to let you know as early as now that the people behind the bike are pegging the Legacy to cost at a price of around $350,000.

Still interested?

Continue reading to read more about the Bienville Legacy.

Why it matters

How do you properly describe a motorcycle that’s as visually arresting as the Bienville Legacy. I suppose you can throw out whatever hyperbole you can think of instantaneously but even that probably won’t do justice to the overall composition of the Legacy.

The bike really is a shock to the senses and for my money, that’s exactly the kind of reaction Jim Jacoby and J.T. Nesbitt wanted when they started collaborating on the bike that’s supposed to have none of the commercial theatrics of other bikes in the market.

What you see with the Bienville Legacy really is what you get and I suppose that’s what’s really great about it.

Nesbitt, in particular, was the brains behind the design of the Legacy. Considering that he’s renowned for building some outlandish monstrosities (in a good way!) in the past, designing the Legacy was right down his proverbial alley.

Once he received the thumbs up from Jacoby, Nesbitt immediately envisioned what he wanted to do with the Legacy. Knowing his background, that particular “vision” turned out to be another complete work of art. If you really wanted to imagine what the method was behind the design of the Legacy, think of it as starting from a blank canvas that was slowly being transformed into a priceless masterpiece. You wouldn’t recognize it from the beginning, but once the art starts taking shape, you begin to see what it looks like as a whole.

That, in a nutshell, is what Legacy is. It began with a 1650 cc Motus MV4 engine that was given a Rotrex centrifugal supercharger to bring its output up close to 300 horsepower instead of the stock 185 ponies. Once that was done, Nesbitt and his team went to work on building a frame that can accommodate the massive MV4 engine.

Ever the out-of-the-box thinker, Nesbitt went with a frame that was designed around a giant composite polymer leaf spring that joins both the swingers and the girder forks to the frame, suspending both ends of the bike. To keep the bike from losing control, Nesbitt installed separate damping units on both ends and a unique component pilfered from mountain bikes to provide harder damping.

Two identical carbon composite blades with built-in eccentric adjusters were also installed on the front-end and rear swingers. These blades serve different purposes on both ends of the bike but both are equally important in creating a versatile bike that can be adjusted on a whim.

You probably noticed that the Legacy’s leather saddle sticks out like a sore thumb in the design of Legacy. That didn’t come by accident because if you look closer, you’ll notice that the seat is actually sitting on a support structure made up of six titanium blades that mirrors the composition of the leaf sing and the sky-facing exhaust cans.

What’s most impressive about the Legacy is that Nesbitt actually sketched the bike first before using CAD designs to bring it to life. It might be a Herculean task for other builders, but not for a guy like J.T Nesbitt.