THE ASTONISHING STORY OF MOTO CORSA
The good thing is that you’re restoring an old Laverda, the kind of work discerning customers reqularly employ you to undertake. This one – a Jota – is for sale. Unfortunately, there are several bad things. You’re in an old cowshed on a hill with only a grass air strip for company, and it’s winter. You’ve converted it as best you can, but the resto business often seems to be a labour of love first and a decent earner a distant second; and the bikes you sell trading as Moto Corsa (which include new MVs) aren’t exactly racing out of the door. This is where you’ve ended up after years of service to the motorcycle industry, man and boy. Your experience of running dealerships (including one with a turnover of 12.5.k units per annum), working in Italy at Ducati and MV, importing classic marques, and your intimate knowledge of the inside of Italian motorcycles has ended up with your being right here, right now. You’re seriously considering calling time on the manifestly unequal struggle.
And then the man arrives. He checks out the Jota you’re just finishing, a beautiful resurrection with K Tech suspension, electrics from this century – a completely sorted bike on sale at £18.5k. The man thinks that’s decent value. He informs you that he’s just bought a 1937 Bentley 4.25 (supercharged) at an auction in San Diego. It set him back £550,000 – and this was interesting information, because experience told you it wasn’t bullshit. You chat, and then he walks away. Without the Laverda. You shrug your shoulders and knuckle down. Your name is Mike Russell de Clifford, and although you had no way of knowing it at the time, this moment marked the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Three days later, a van turns up at the benighted cowshed and unloads a series 2 Jota. It hasn’t been booked in, and there are no contact details forthcoming bar a name – which you recognise as belonging to the vanished Bentley owner: Dr.Guy.
‘ He’s a genius ‘
Geoffrey Guy was part of a small but elite medical cadre: doctors whose love of motorcycling had launched them on the trajectory of travelling marshal at the TT. The same combination of interests would eventually to lead him to Mike’s shed, albeit under very different circumstances. The path that took him there has become the stuff of biopharma legend.
A beneficial linkage between a severe form of paediatric epilepsy and the CBD constituent of cannabis sativa had long been suspected, but research was thin on the ground and the whole area was fraught with socio legal complications. Dr.Guy’s personal experience of observing CBD administration on the ward (in Holland) convinced him that this was a regime which would repay further scrutiny. The company he formed to do this, GW Pharmaceuticals, joined forces with an Amsterdam based research corporation whose speciality was the (legal) cultivation of highly specialised strains, containing a large proportion of either THC or CBD. Both of which were incorporated into GW’s ground breaking Sativex, aimed principally at MS patients, which became the first C.Sativa product to gain market approval anywhere in the world. In June 2018, GW’s Epidiolex – for the treatment of newborns and children with specific forms of epilepsy – gained US FDA approval. The UK followed suite in November last year. All of which means that GW or its licencees are the sole providers of legally prescribable cannabis derived products in 26 countries. In these Covid -19 reactive times it’s hard to realistically gauge a company’s net worth, but a biotech market analyst I spoke to reckoned $4bn was ballpark. If current trials for GW’s new CBDV drug are successful, that figure will need some heavy upward revision, becuase one of its applications is the treatment of autism. Since Dr.Guy is GW’s major shareholder, the odd Bentley or Laverda purchase presents no financial difficulties. ‘ Put it this way ‘, said the analyst, ‘ your man went out and did the biggest dope deal of all time. Legally. And then did it again. He’s a genius. ‘
Whatever he is, Geoffrey Guy is certainly much more than an entrepreneur in a white coat who loves bikes. His own painstaking research and expertise paved the way which eventually led him to the arse end of Compton Abbas airfield, Moto Corsa and Mike Russel de Clifford.
The motorcycle trade is a hard arsed business. There are no fairy godmothers…
A few days after the van turns up, Dr.Guy calls Mike to confirm the arrival of his Jota, and commission its restoration. He’s a dream customer: the resto money arrives in Mike’s account in advance, and on completion he’s thrilled with Mike’s handywork. If only all punters were like that. A couple of weeks later, a Le Mans 2 turns up, followed by a CBX. Mike does a few more bike’s from Geoffrey’s private collection, but by the following year, 2016, the lease on the shed is up and thetemptation to just do the odd one from home is still there. Apart from anything else, Mrs de Clifford has had enough of doing her day job and the Corsa accounts. Mike rings around the customers to inform them of his decision. One of them – guess who – demurs, urging Mike to hang in there until they’ve had a chance to discuss the situation face to face. Reluctantly Mike agrees to do this. The following day Mrs de Clifford finds an extra £20k in the Moto Corsa bank account. Mike knows who has put it there, and immediately rings his benefactor with objections. But Dr.Guy insists that this is simply a gift, ‘ to tide you over’. He values Mike’s skills and experience and and wont hear any objections.
Make no mistake. The motorcycle trade is hard arsed business, founded on harvesting the dreams of people like you and me and turning them into profit. There are no fairy godmothers. Mike had seen it all over the years, and knew that this kind of thing just didn’t happen. ‘ I was flabbergasted ’, he says.
The following week Geoffrey Guy turns up, and together they formulate a business plan to keep the restoration arm of Corsa running smoothly for a year. However, during this period something happened which could easily have been a disaster. A plan was formulated to relaunch a Corsa showroom, featuring high end end brands. When Mike told me this, it was my turn to be flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe he’d wanted to dive back back into the special circle of hell which multi franchise dealerships tend to occupy, especially those flogging exotica. After all, the resto business was now on a sound footing, the cowshed had been tamed, and Mike was doing what he loved. So why in the name of God even think about taking on a new premises stuffed with the marques most vendors would have topping the avoidance charts: MV, Horex, Norton and Brough. And a few Aprilias thrown in with the Guzzis. Had someone gone insane?
Well, not exactly. As Mike acknowledged, there is an element of heart over head in the business. It makes sense to derive as much pleasure as you can out of what you’re doing, and the exotica provided some stunning window dressing to front Corsa’s rebirth. Geoffrey Guy is also driven by passion: like Mike, he’s fundamentally a good old fashioned petrol head (albeit one with an eye of the future), and unsurprisingly Moto Corsa reflects this. Nevertheless, the pair drew the line when they rejected the possibility of not just dealing MVs, but buying the brand: asking price at the time (2016) was €25m to bag the majority shareholding. The money wasn’t a problem, but everything that came with the deal was. ‘We’d have had our trousers pulled down’ Mike told me (recalling for this QPR supporter the legendary Harry Redknapp’s comment about his own multi millionaire chairman – Tony Fernandes – being ‘bent over’ by unscrupulous agents). Some things are best left as dreams.
‘ It’s like a slow tide coming in… ‘
No one was under any illusion that the expedient of selling exclusivity was going to turn a quick profit: to some extent the original brands functioned as loss leaders. Meanwhile, a lot of common sense infrastructure decisions were made. The cowshed was re-appropriated as the service centre, complete with all mod cons and a large stock of spares; and a quality cafe installed at what had become Moto Corsa’s new showroom, the old brewery at Gillingham in North Dorset – all 10k sq ft of it. This exotic space was purchased outright: at the time it was the HQ of legendary antiques emporium Talisman. Punters can take their ease in the extensive garden, chilling by the pond while enjoying decent coffee and the prospect of food rather more enticing than the usual bike meet fare. Upstairs there’s an extensive range of clobber featuring all the top brands and clued up staff.
Those iffy lines got ditched early doors, and were pragmatically replaced with the likes of Royal Enfield. Mike has had a career long association with Guzzi, and the marque has performed well in its commodious new surroundings. Romantic vintage lovers they may be, but both Mike and Geoffrey were keeping tabs on newer technology. They became UK importers for Energica, and are well placed to benefit from the rapid evolution of electric bikes. ‘It’s like a slow tide coming in’, said Mike, and big picture wise, few would disagree. KTM have recently joined the party, plugging a large hole in their network. The MVs are still there. They remain close to Mike’s heart – I’d wager no one outside of Varese is more knowledgable about the company in its many manifestations.
The knowledge: that’s one reason why I’d actually buy from Corsa. Straight up. The workbench expertise (ie where it really counts) is massively present, along with a genuine passion – an unusual combination of qualities in motorcycle retail. Mike still PDIs every single machine himself.
A fantastically interesting time…
The enigmatic Dr.Geoffrey Guy – predictably dubbed Dr.Dope in the tabloids – is understandably reluctant to talk to journalists, so chatting with him for half an hour was a welcome surprise. Long term motorcyclists can be a very conservative bunch, especially lovers of old school traditional engineering, but it was clear Dr.Guy has a rather different take on Planet Bike, and that take is distinctly (and appropriately) green.
He pointed out what a fantastically interesting time this is for vehicle technology, with electrics, hydrogen and synthetic fuels in the frame: are all here right now, but equally all retain a significant carbon based footprint. Dr.Guy is confident that problems will be overcome. It wouldn’t be a massive surprise to discover that his interest extends beyond mere curiosity, and Corsa’s relationship with Energica (among others) means they are well placed to further that interest.
‘ I always make time for riding ’ Geoffrey told me, and I suspect that his motive for doing so is as much to do with escape as adrenalin. You haven’t got the time to worry about business heading down a mountain trail in Spain, and Corsa run their own off road expeditions in both the Pyrenees and Dorset, much of it on land owned by a company affiliate. Both Mike and Dr.Guy regularly participate.
In researching this piece, I spoke to other people in the business who expressed a degree of cynicism about Moto Corsa’s astonishing epiphany. There is a certain lack of generosity in this view, in marked contrast to Geoffrey Guy’s own approach in facilitating it. Maybe the whole deal has simply been a labour of love – in Mike, Geoffrey recognised not merely a fellow enthusiast but tangible expertise, a quality central to his own career; and in Geoffrey, Mike saw a chance to actually enjoy his profession expansively: ie without all the grief. But only a fool would bet against the enterprise becoming a commercial success. Irrespective of outcome, as far as the rest of us are concerned, Planet Bike became a more interesting place as a result of Mike Russel de Clifford and Dr.Geoffrey Guy crossing paths. Long may their journey continue.
excellent and uplifting article