What’s the craziest, most insane motorcycle engine swap you’ve ever seen? We’ve talked about quite a few crazy ones in the past, with a lot of these being crossovers to and from the car world. A lot of people make use of the Suzuki Hayabusa engine for all sorts of racing applications.
And while motorbike engines in cars are one thing, car engines in motorcycles are certainly a completely different ballgame.
But is there a better car engine to swap into a bike than one that’ll instantly have passers-by looking intently with their jaws on the floor? Well, this is exactly what LA-based custom workshop Hazan Motorworks is doing with its latest project with a Ferrari-powered motorcycle.
Somehow, somewhere, Maxwell Hazan, the founder and owner of Maxwell Motorworks, managed to find a Ferrari F355 engine. But instead of selling it or using it for some custom sports car thing, he decided that it would be a good idea to stuff it into a motorcycle—or rather, build a motorcycle around the thing.
In case you weren’t familiar with the Ferrari F355, more specifically its engine, it’s one of the most iconic engines out there, producing a sound that’s unmistakably Ferrari. It’s a 3.5-liter V8 equipped with a flat-plane crankshaft, hence the smooth and silky exhaust note.
Imagine hearing this thing and expecting to see a Ferrari fly by but instead a custom bike goes past, leaving you with more questions than answers.
At the moment, we don’t know exactly what Hazan Motorworks has planned for this thing other than the fact that it’s surely a sporty machine. As you can see in the Instagram post, it’s rocking what appears to be a fully customized frame underpinned by an aluminum sportbike and inverted front forks that seem to have been taken off a supersport bike.
And with around 380 horsepower to the crank, this bike will surely need some solid foundations.
From a functional point of view, custom builds like this clearly make no sense. I mean, there are tons of new, high-performance motorcycles that are lighter, faster, more comfortable than this custom machine. But none of them are powered by the engine of the legendary Ferrari F355.
And so, it’s clear that this bike is an exercise in pushing the bounds of what’s possible when it comes to custom bikes, and for all intents and purposes, is a rolling piece of art with an ungodly exhaust note and flashy red valve covers to boot.
With all that being said, it seems that there’s still some work left before this bike can be called a finished product. Nevertheless, Hazan seems to be making quick progress with it, and is set to showcase what he’s done so far at Macchinissima.
So if you want to see this bike in the metal, as well as a bunch of other classic Italian machines, you might want to swing by the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens on August 3.
