If you’re a person who’s been living on this planet for long enough that you can read this post, you know that the lure of the forbidden is, at times, intoxicatingly strong. I mean, anyone who ever snuck out of the house after they were supposed to be at home on a school night knows that, right?
Understanding that mentality will get you a long way toward understanding why on earth someone would want to create a 76 brake horsepower, liquid-cooled, parallel twin performance engine to stick inside a 1960s Lambretta scooter. As the fine folks at ScooterLab UK have observed, you certainly could get a motorcycle that makes similar or even more power—but then, my friend, you’d be missing the point.
Both motorcycles and scooters come with certain expectations. In almost every case, that’s precisely why it’s such delicious fun to subvert those expectations, when and where possible. Thus, Casa Performance. For those unfamiliar, it’s the performance wing of Rimini Lambretta Centre, located in Poggio Berni, Italy (which is just a little west of Rimini, and slightly north of San Marino).
On The Lam:
Casa Performance creates and tests racing-oriented scooter performance parts on the racetrack—and then develops them into some of the most insane parts you can buy for your scooter. That, friends, is how the Casa Performance 250 Twin engine was born.
Of course, stuffing an engine like this inside an existing Lambretta chassis will require some serious supporting modifications. Since it’s liquid-cooled, for example, Casa Performance had to find somewhere to stick the radiator. With space at a premium, it ended up mounted to the apron up front, which you’ll see in the video.
Another major consideration was exhaust routing, as you’ll also see. What’s shown is, in all probability, not what the final version will look like—but it does go a long way toward demonstrating proof of concept.
The folks at ScooterLab UK got the opportunity to both road test and dyno test this absolutely bonkers machine. That 76 bhp number, incidentally, is what was measured on the dyno at the rear wheel. It’s no wonder, then, that this thing is absolutely out of its mind, and wants to wheelie in pretty much every gear.
While this Casa Performance 250 twin engine isn’t available for sale just yet, the plan is for it to be yet another thing that interested riders with the right coin can buy and install in their own machines. As you’d rightly expect, it won’t be cheap—with the expectation currently resting somewhere in the range of 11,000-ish Euros (about $11,662 as of January 4, 2023). If you’re interested in reading a long-form review of this machine, head to the ScooterLab link in our Sources.
Sources: ScooterLab, Rimini Lambretta Centre