How can a Bimota, apparently worth £30k, fail to sell for £5,000?
A recent auction listing I’ve been following has yielded an unexpected result, as a £30,000 Bimota KB4 ends pitifully.
The world of online auctions is a murky place that I generally only visit on a Friday night. Most often after the pub and a few too many shandies. One particular auction that caught my eye recently was for a tidy and low-mileage Bimota KB4.
Everything about the bike said it was going to be an interesting one to watch, although as the bidding drew to a close, I actually couldn’t believe my eyes.
The bike in question is an as-new and never registered example. It boasts just two miles on the clock and was being sold via a European bike specialist in Las Vegas. And it’s a rare beast over there, with this bike being just one of six officially important to the US, according to the listing.
It had all the hallmarks of a sure-fire seller. Italian exotica from a storied brand, which is backed up by years of racing pedigree and enough twists and turns in the company’s history to write many, many books.
As I watched the auction time tick down, though, and patiently waited for the flurry of bids to pile in, something weird happened. Or rather, nothing happened. There was a tickle of bids towards the end of the auction, but nothing that could take the bike close to its expected reserve price. In the end, the hammer fell at just $6,760 or around £5,000, leaving the bike unsold as the reserve was not met..
It shows just how key a bike's history is to it making its value on the open market. Checking out another Bimota auction on another site, I can find a tidy SB8K, from a time when Bimota had the open market to source its engines from, with Suzuki supplying it 996cc V-twin from the TL1000R for this one. That bike managed to sell for $21,000 or around £15,000, proving that while new is probably faster in every sense, it’s not always what people are looking for from their drunken Friday night purchase!
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
