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Benelli BN251

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Benelli motorcycles will finally be coming back to the American market, with SSR Motorsports taking on the importation and distribution duties for China’s Qinjiang Group – the owner of the Benelli motorcycle brand.

Benelli’s debut model in the USA seems set to be the Benelli TnT25, which looks suspiciously like the Benelli BN251 that we showed you back in November of last year.

If that’s the case, then it will be stark contrast to the Benelli we have been used to seeing in the US, namely an Italian brand that invokes all aspects of the Italian motorcycle heritage: utterly beautiful machines that are also notoriously unreliable.

Brands like Ducati, Vespa, and Benelli can trace their roots back to post-WWII Italy, where infrastructure and roads were shattered, and the country desperately needed a cheap, reliable, and effective way to navigate from Point-A to Point-B.

Enter the rise of the motorcycle to meet those needs; and from that, what has become over half a century of motorcycle culture in Italy. The first Italian motorcycles were really just bicycles with motors, and as more proper machines came into being, they were still tiny in displacement.

Therefore, the quintessential Italian motorcycle was what we would call today a small-displacement bike. Benelli is getting back to those roots now, introducing the Benelli BN251 at this year’s EICMA show.