With a succession of powerful four-cylinder machines, Gilera was a two-wheeled giant in the 1950s, winning six 500cc world championships, including a hat-trick for British ace Geoff Duke.
And while the Italian marque was dominating racing’s premier class with its exotic factory fours, it was also winning races – and earning both admirers and revenue – with a relatively simple, single-cylinder 500cc machine: the Saturno Sport.
The Sport was the street-racing star of a Saturno family that also included the softer Turismo (Touring), plus a police bike and a further detuned military model. Lean, simple, and finished in Italian racing red, the Sport was that country’s equivalent of BSA’s Gold Star: a quick, fine-handling, versatile single that was at home both on the racetrack and the road.
Decades later, riding a well-preserved Sport confirms that the little machine still lives up to its name. When I wound open its throttle moments after pulling away for the first time, the Gilera surged forward with far more enthusiasm than I’d expected from such an elderly single.
The Sport felt lively and eager, accelerating with a thumping sound from its silencer and a sucking noise from the Dell’Orto carburettor down by my right shin. A few minutes later, engine now warm, I was out on the open road, prodding from third into top gear with my right toe, then crouching with my chin almost touching the tank, and peering past the moving top of the girder front suspension system.
When the road started to head downhill, I held on as the little single charged on toward its top speed of about 85mph. Not that there was any speedometer to confirm this. Such items were a luxury when this Saturno emerged from Gilera’s factory at Arcore, north of Milan, in 1950.
By then the firm already had plenty of experience with high-performance singles. Gilera had been founded in 1909, when Giuseppe Gellera, a young mechanic and hill-climb competitor, produced a 317cc single-cylinder bike in his workshop near Milan. Gellera changed his name to Gilera, as he thought this made a better name for his motorbike firm, which grew into one of Italy’s most successful during the next two decades.
The Saturno, designed by an engineer named Giuseppe Salmaggi, was developed from the “eight-bolt” (Otto Bulloni) single that was Gilera’s main 500cc machine in the late 1930s. The first few Saturnos, introduced in 1940, were racing bikes. Gilera tester Massimo Masserini gave the model a good start when he won the prestigious Targa Florio road race that year, before production was interrupted by World War II.
Gilera began full-scale Saturno production in 1946. Its engine remained an air-cooled vertical single, with long-stroke dimensions of 84 x 90mm giving a capacity of 499cc. It had pushrod-operated valves closed by hairpin springs and a four-speed gearbox with a dry clutch.
The Saturno Sport had an aluminium cylinder head, 6:1 compression ratio, and produced a claimed 22bhp at 5000rpm. That gave it a top speed advantage of about 10mph over the 18bhp Turismo model, which used an iron head, lower 5.5:1 compression, and a softer camshaft.
The Saturno engine design is heavily finned and pleasingly clean, enhanced by the words “GILERA ARCORE” picked out in large red letters around the primary drive cover. The chassis is mostly conventional, with a simple steel frame and girder forks.
This Sport, which was built in 1950 although not registered until two years later, features a distinctive rear suspension system that Gilera had patented in the 1930s. An oval-section swing-arm transmits rear wheel movement, via two upright steel arms, to horizontal springs mounted in boxes above the swing-arm.
Each box contains a main spring to deal with bumps, plus a smaller rebound spring. Damping is provided by adjustable, scissors-type friction units connecting each spring box with the swing-arm.
By the time this Sport was registered in 1952, Gilera had introduced telescopic forks and conventional rear shocks. But the little bike seemed all the more appealing for its old-school appearance as I started it by retarding the ignition with the lever on the left bar, then jabbing my right boot on the kickstarter.
The motor duffed into life obediently, though its unreliable idle meant I had to keep blipping the throttle to avoid needing a repeat performance. The Gilera is compact and reasonably light, at 170kg, and felt very manageable as I reached to grip its low, forward-curving handlebars.
For a simple single built midway through the last century, the Sport really did have impressively lively performance, especially at low revs where its long-stroke dimensions helped give heaps of torque. On narrow country roads it was quick enough to be very entertaining, especially as there was plenty to keep my mind occupied.
Changing gear took a bit of getting used to, as the lever was a heel-and-toe device on the right side, with a one-up, three-down pattern – so doubly confusing after a modern box. That apart, the change was reasonably slick, though finding neutral was sometimes tricky.
The Gilera was generally sufficiently smooth to be fairly comfortable, too. Predictably, though, vibration became increasingly intrusive as the revs rose. Although the quoted maximum of 85mph felt about right, I wouldn’t have wanted to hold it at that speed for long. On straighter sections I was occasionally tempted to slide right back and adopt a racy crouch using the narrow, mudguard-mounted pillion pad.
Twisty roads are this bike’s natural habitat, and its handling was excellent considering its age; certainly good enough to make me understand how Saturno riders managed to mix it with rivals on more powerful multi-cylinder machinery on the twisty Italian street circuits of the ’40s and ’50s.
The girder front end coped with most bumps well, considering the centrally placed spring’s lack of damping. The rear was OK, too, after a bit of fiddling with the rear friction dampers, although the way the sprung saddle bounced around gave a strangely vague feel in corners.
This wasn’t really a problem once I got used to it, and the Saturno’s geometry and light weight combined to make it effortlessly agile. Although its 19-inch Italian tyres were narrow they gripped sufficiently well to establish that the slender single had plenty of ground clearance.
Even the front brake was respectably powerful, despite being a simple single-leading-shoe drum, operated by a short cable leading to a long rod running diagonally from alongside the headlight. With the help of the similar rear drum, the Gilera could be stopped reassuringly hard, in contrast to many of its contemporaries.
Mind you, I’d expect nothing less than good brakes of such a purposeful, race-ready machine as the Saturno Sport. This, after all, was essentially the single-cylinder design from which Gilera had developed the Saturno Sport Sanremo racers that won many important events, including an Italian Grand Prix, in the late 1940s.
Although Gilera’s Grand Prix glory of the 1950s was earned by its mighty fours, the single proved a capable back-up on twistier tracks. The Arcore factory’s rising star, Alfredo Milani, highlighted its pace at the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuïc in 1951, when he established a big lead before retiring with engine failure.
And the single’s blend of high performance and relatively low cost made it hugely attractive to privateer racers. As with BSA’s rival Gold Star, many Sport owners simply removed road-going parts such as lights and battery, then took to the track, often with considerable success.
That helped keep the Saturno popular until the mid-1950s, when production fell, until finally ceasing at the end of the decade, by which time almost 6500 had been built. By that point, Gilera’s management was focused on the firm’s annual production of more than 20,000 lightweight bikes with engines from 98 to 175cc.
Crucially, in 1959, the Saturno Sport’s price of half a million lire would also buy a Fiat 500. That was one battle that even the racy red single, with all its speed and spirit, could never win.
