Twenty minutes a day: A Quick Pit Stop with Mark of Futuri Motion Tech
Who is Mark? By day he's an IT guy at a bank, by night he is a man building custom Ducati's that will blow your mind. His latest bike took five and a half years, weighs 310 pounds wet, and makes 112 horsepower at the rear wheel.
Welcome back to Pit Stop, the corner of American Moto Co. where we pull over to explore the craft, the culture, and the creators who keep the raw, unfiltered soul of motorcycling alive. Today we're catching up with Mark of Futuri Motion Tech, out of the Netherlands, who builds bikes that challenge the laws of physics.
"I have a full-time job in IT at a Dutch bank. I was burned out with my job and I needed to change something. I needed to start building stuff with my hands."
Growing up his dad built bikes in the garage, mopeds first and then whatever the budget allowed, a chopper, a cafe racer, a supermoto, across any brand that came up cheap. Mark admits that he did not spend that much time out there with him.
"You do pick up certain pieces, even when you're walking by or just checking something out for ten minutes."
What he picked up was the assumption that building anything is possible.
So when he went looking for a learning project, he found a Ducati 900SS on Facebook Marketplace for about twelve hundred euros. Not the prettiest show pony in the Ducati lineup, which is exactly why it was cheap enough to cut apart without guilt.
Then he made a friend who is a well known Dutch Ducati race mechanic who told him that Ducati parts are interchangeable across years and models. "You can build anything, it all fits together."
But Mark is not one to draw the project ahead of time. He has the bike in his head and starts buying raw material then building lines in physical space. Once he has a rolling frame, it goes in the living room.
There are three bikes in there right now.
"Every day when I get up and go downstairs, I see the bike. I can just think about..."
Mark 3D prints prototype parts and sticks them to the bike. A fairing might live on that bike for a day or for a month while he walks past it, and eventually he takes a marker and draws directly on the part to mark what is wrong. He has buckets full of rejected prototype fairings. Last December one of his two large printers ran twenty four hours a day for a month.
He also designed a set of click-together exhaust segments, so he can build the exhaust run, twist it into the exact shape he wants, and then use it as a template for welding. Rather than fabricating it in metal.
What he refuses to do is force it.
"It needs to be like a Eureka moment."
And when the Eureka is not coming, he has a rule that I wrote down during our interview.
"If I don't feel it, I just do twenty minutes. Even though the result is shit, you made a few steps ahead of knowing okay, this route wasn't great. Add that up over a week, over a month, you almost have a week's work invested."
None of that would matter if he could not build the parts, which is why he spent two days in Amsterdam to learn the basics of TIG and then back to school in Breda for 12 days to become a certified aluminium TIG welder.
That is also how he found his real teachers. Once he was in those rooms, he started meeting the old school bodywork and filler and paint guys. "They see a guy in front of them that wants to learn, is listening, is enthusiastic. And then the doors open up."
Which brings us to the bike.
The Desmoto is a supermoto he spent five and a half years on. The targets were under 330 pounds dry and 120 horsepower at the rear wheel. He beat the weight number and landed at 112 horsepower after scaling his own expectation back, which put him at 310 pounds wet. Somebody did the math and told him it makes more power per kilogram than a Bugatti Veyron.
Getting there meant titanium, magnesium and aluminium, and the budget going out the window.
"But I was building this for myself, so fuck it."
Growing as a builder comes at a cost though, Mark had bought everything to do carbon fiber the traditional way, rolls and vacuum machines and wet bags, but then the build took so long that all his epoxy expired and went in the bin.
So instead of building the fairings out of carbon fiber, he just printed them in carbon fiber. He estimates that shaved seven months off the build.
I spent an hour with Mark and going through the spec list, I had to know how the hell he rides such a monster. "I'm afraid to ride this bike. I didn't even ride it full open throttle, because it's so light." It wants to wheelie constantly.
It is for sale. Insurance valued it at fifty five thousand euros, which he is quick to say is not what he wants for it. He wants it to go to somebody who understands what it is. If you are thinking about it, note that Mark did detune it before listing it, from 112 horsepower down to 104, purely so the next owner would not have to service it as much.
I asked Mark what was next.
"I'm dreaming about a scenario where I have my garage doors open and a young guy in his twenties walks by and asks me a question. And all of a sudden I can hand over knowledge that somebody handed to me."
You can find Mark's builds at futuri.tech or @futuri_motiontech and follow the process on his socials, where the bike is always in the picture and he mostly is not.
