MASERATI T2 SS 50CC 'ROSPO'

COPYRIGHT - Words by Adam Bolton. Photography by Sara Zinelli

Toad in the whole

What are you supposed to do if you yearn after a bike but you can't find one? The answer to that's easy - you have to make one! This is the situation Ron Murrell found himself in a couple of years ago, and he decided to do something about it.

As a collector of 50cc Italian sports mopeds, the object of Ron Murrell's desire wasn't some financially out of reach rare MV works racer or one-off prototype, the kind of thing you might see in a museum or going under the hammer for tens of thousands of pounds. No, the bike Ron wanted was a 50cc 2-stroke tiddler - a Maserati T2 SS 'Rospo'. In case you were wondering, 'Rospo' is Italian for toad. More on that later.

Ron lives in Australia, but spent his youth growing up in South Africa, not a nation you might expect would have had an enthusiastic market for Italian 50cc bikes in the 1950s and 1960s, but this wasn't the case.
" I got my first ever bike in 1963 - a 50cc Garelli Super Sport. In those days, a 16 year old in South Africa could ride a 50cc bike until they were 18 and got a car, or a licence for a bigger bike. There were actually many Italian bikes around at the time, but sales were dominated by Garelli, Itom and Maserati. All these makers had bigger engined versions of their 50ccers, so like most teenagers desperate to go faster than their mates, we'd fit cranks and barrels from a Garelli 98cc for instance, and then register it as a 50, albeit illegally". Oh, the abandon of youth in the quest for speed! Most of us who rode bikes as teenagers will recognise this pattern of behaviour. Fast forward 30 years to the early 90s, and Ron, now with some disposable income, decides to indulge his passion for the 50cc bikes he so enjoyed in his youth. Driver licencing laws are different in Australia, and no one that Ron spoke to had really heard of these bikes, so he decided to find one for himself. Not having taken even a single photo of the Garelli he'd owned as a youngster, he wanted to show other people a bike that they'd probably never seen before. Ron found it harder going than he expected. "I immediately discovered that these 50cc bikes are incredibly rare and difficult to find. Most were either thrashed and trashed by teenagers of the time, and were considered not worth preserving or restoring.

But where does the Maserati come into it, I ask Ron. "On a visit to South Africa In the mid 90s, I heard from a contact who had a Maserati frame and three 50cc motors. I bought them at once, and then noticed that one of the motors had the prefix SS on the number."

The SS prefix meant that the motor came from a rare Maserati 50 T2 SS model, otherwise known as the 'Rospo'. Legend has it that back in 1957, the wife of Bologna Maserati dealer and racer Guido Borri saw the first 50cc bikes arrive at the showroom, and exclaimed "What is this ugly toad?” The woman obviously had no taste, but the nickname stuck, cemented in punters' minds by the decals depicting a toad that Signor Borri decided to affix to each 50 T2 SS he sold. In production from 1957 to 1960, the Rospo represented the high performance 50cc bike from the range. Light, compact and fast back then for a 50cc, it was drop dead gorgeous, and was a genuine race replica of its day. Race number boards and exposed fork springs came as standard on what was a production model built in limited numbers, hence its rarity today, but at the time was a commercial success. Although Maserati didn't have a genuine race department in a period when Italian machines were at their peak of competition dominance, the factory were happy to prepare bikes for paying (read wealthy) customers, and the Rospo was seen competing in events like the Giro d'Italia and the Milano-Taranto.

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