Aprilia Futura - model history
Even before Aprilia's first 1,000cc sportsbike, the RSV Mille, broke cover, there was talk of the Italian company building an RSV-powered sports tourer.
Aprilia
aimed to make the most of the Mille's success by putting the stonking
Vee twin motor - built to Aprilia's specification by Rotax - into as many
bikes as it could get away with.
The most successful of these, the Tuono, was little more than a naked RSV with flat bars. But first, in 1999, came the SL1000 Falco - the SL stands for Sports Light - a budget RSV with a classy frame and a little less performance.
Then, in 2000, the company announced the big trailie ETV1000 Caponord - and the RST1000 Futura.
Aimed squarely at Honda's VFR, the RST (Sport Touring, of course!) bristled with innovation and technology, and borrowed its name from Aprilia's early 90s sports 125.
At
the time the 125 Futura helped carve Aprilia's image as a company that
used brave technological solutions and bold styling to good effect. The
company believed the 1,000cc Futura would further bolster that image,
and show the world what a sports tourer should be.
Both bikes sported a single-sided swing arm, although each has the arm on opposite sides, but the similarities end there.
While the 125 Futura sold like hot cakes, the RST1000 Futura singularly failed to catch the imagination of the public.
On paper it's difficult to see why.
Before
the Futura came along, most bike manufacturers - with a few notable exceptions
- didn't take sports tourers seriously. The approach was to take the cutting
edge sports bikes of a few years back, sling on budget suspension and
brakes, and sell them cheap. Aprilia's approach was different.
For starters, the company's in-house design team used the engine from the 2000 Mille - their current sports bike - and cutting edge (for the time) Brembo Gold brakes. The modified Mille aluminium twin-spar frame had a rake of 25.6 degrees for stability with Showa forks adjustable for preload and rebound damping. The compression damping adjuster was blanked off.
The single-sided swing arm was there to make tyre changes easy - or so Aprilia suits told baffled journos at the bike's launch - but it was one of a host of innovations on the bike to aid covering big miles.
Innovative technology
It also sported an underseat exhaust silencer, which allowed big panniers to be fitted without sacrificing ground clearance, and a fuel filler cap offset to the right to allow riders to fill the tank with the bike on the sidestand - a feature shamelessly nicked from BMW's R1100S.
The Mille engine was detuned for a wider spread of torque across the rev range and a greater flywheel effect, using Sagem fuel injection, and a catalytic converter - another rarity on a bike at the time - sat in a pre-silencer under the engine. All this helped change the character of the bike to smooth out a lot of the vee twin vibes, while maintaining its torquey character and a decent top speed of over 150mph.
There
were other little touches - part-digital LCD clocks (with blue backlighting);
integral front indicators and mirrors; an ambient air temperature readout
on the dash; of course a clock; and the panniers - originally an optional
extra.
And of course there was the seat, comfortable enough for two to ride all day, with a hump to keep the passenger away from the rider under heavy braking. The design team had clearly thought long and hard about rider comfort, but also pillion comfort and general ease of use. From its quiet exhaust note to its classy dash the bike oozed refinement.
But the way the bike looked always divided opinion. The bike was fully enclosed in a big, angular fairing that did a good job but possibly looked too futuristic for the time. At the time of writing in 2008 it still looks futuristic, but somehow less outlandish, but back then...
The
first prototypes were exhibited at the various bike shows in autumn 2000,
and slight cosmetic changes were made. Some of these prototypes later
found their way into private hands and one in particular was shipped to
the US and tested to get the necessary permission to export the Futura
to the States. It spent a few years forgotten in the back of a warehouse
before being rescued by Coug66 of the Apriliaforum.
The Futura was launched in Sicily in the spring of 2001 but using pre-production bikes. Only four of the 11 production lines at Aprilia's Scorze factory make 1,000cc bikes, and with the emphasis on producing RSVs, Futuras had to be built in batches. The first such batch of 5,000 Futuras began production in Spring 2001.
Aprilia bosses were proud of the bike, and quick to mention that the Futura was a sports tourer with the emphasis on sport, intended to take on the VFR, the Triumph Sprint ST and the Ducati ST4.
They spoke enthusiastically of improvements to be made in following years - heated grips, a power socket in the dash, ABS, an electronic security system to be developed by Sagem, suppliers of the ECU.
So why did it fail?
On the whole, the bike was well-received by the world's press on launch, with only the odd moan about looks. It won many of the inevitable sports tourer shootouts in magazines yet when it hit the streets in July 2001 it failed to sell. Except perhaps in the US, Futuras remained nailed to showroom floors and word spread.
Perhaps the bike's looks contributed to its poor sales, but there are many other factors.
In the UK it was priced slightly higher than the VFR - about £7,900 - which didn't help when you consider Aprilia was trying to sell to a new market for them - riders who wanted to put miles on their bikes, and riders who were less likely take a risk with an Italian bike for a few hundred pounds less than a proven Japanese machine.
Heavy discounting and cheap parallel imports were too little, too late.
Aprilia's poor parts back-up could also have played a part, along with bad publicity from riders with broken fuel quick-disconnects. Add to that the fact that sales of Vee twins had taken a dive with the end of their racing domination, thanks to the arrival of the new generation of pocket-sized 1,000cc fours and the change in World Superbike rules.
Poor sales probably put paid to Aprilia's early plans for an updated Futura for 2002, and the bike remained unchanged. In 2003 it got a facelift but it was purely cosmetic - a new two-tone paintjob with large silver sections - possibly to counter criticism that the bike looked 'slabby' - and two new colours, Darkness Black and Blue Hilton. The seat was slightly changed and the RST1000 Futura decal at the top of the middle fairing sections was removed in favour of an 'RS Touring' logo on the seat panels. The word 'Futura' no longer appeared on the bike, although it was still sold as such.
There was also further evidence of cost-cutting, with the end of colour-coded panniers.
The RS Touring, which also sported a graphic on the tank celebrating Aprilia's entry into Moto GP, was a last ditch attempt to make the bike sell by jazzing up its understated looks. It was produced for the European, UK and Australasian market, and in some countries the bike was sold with panniers and a U lock thrown in. The only technical change was a new, much improved ECU map, which became known as the 05 map.
The end result was that RS Tourings sat unsold in showrooms alongside the older models and that was it for the Futura. It appears that while the bike remained in Aprilia's catalogue for 2004, no more were built.
Already dealers had started heavily discounting Futuras. In the UK, parallel importers killed the official market by selling European models for a little over £5,000 - a massive £3,000 off list price.
But even though Aprilia had taken a massive loss on the Futura, the company was in trouble long before the last RSTs were built.
In 2000 the company had bought Moto Guzzi and Laverda in the spirit of agression that characterised its relentless expansion. But it bit off more than it could chew and worse was to come.
2003 saw Aprilia, already racing in World Superbike, enter Moto GP with the RS3 Cube. It was another massive drain on finances as the bike, with Colin Edwards (sometimes) aboard, struggled to 13th place. Then sales of scooters plummetted, and by summer 2004 Aprilia was in deep, deep trouble.
For months the factory teetered on the brink of closure before being saved by scooter giant Piaggio.
In the years since, most of the rest of the stable of big vee twins has been killed off. Falcos were sold off cheap before being killed off in 05, while Caponords struggled on a few years longer.
No future for the Futura?
The Tuono, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength, receiving updates alongside the new RSVR, while the 750cc Shiver and 850 Mana roadbikes have taken on the Futura's mantle of technological bravery.
Some in the know say the Futura was ahead of its time - especially as far as its looks are concerned - and killed off too early, and point to the fact that the VFR took a while to catch on. But it's hard to see what else Aprilia could have done, given their financial situation, and the market has moved away from sports tourers and towards the big trailie road bikes like the BMW GS. In the meantime Ducati and BMW have quietly dropped their fast sports tourers without replacing them in their ranges.
Meanwhile, although the Futura failed to sell, other manufacturers were quick to borrow from it. The Honda VFR VTEC and Triumph's Sprint ST - arguably inferior bikes - resemble the Futura, and underseat exhausts have become very common indeed.
Will Aprilia make another Futura? Things are very different these days. It's clear that the Aprilia marque has a specific role to fill within the Piaggio empire, and that appears to be racing and sports bikes, with a few naked technological oddities as middleweights thrown in. Aprilia is no longer the family-owned company that can dip a toe in any market, and the sports touring mantle seems to have passed to Moto Guzzi.
Aprilia gives the Piaggio family of bikes racing credibility, but the writing may have been on the wall for the Futura as long ago as April 2000, with the Moto Guzzi takeover.
As Mick Walker wrote in his book 'Aprilia - the complete story' in 2000: "Only time will tell, but it seems most likely that Aprilia will concentrate on sports and racing models, whilst Guzzi will be responsible for touring and custom bikes. But of course there will probably be the odd contradiction on both sides - certainly in the early days of the new set-up."
