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Lazareth LM 847

What better way to party, thought famed custom
creator Ludovic Lazareth, than with a machine that takes
horsepower to the extreme?

Lazareth’s LM 847 is, to the objective eye, a conflation of
impractical ideas, awkwardly overengineered into a
hulking mass of unrideable ostentation that will probably
never turn a wheel on the road.

If that’s your assessment, fine; it’s never stopped Lazareth
bar-end mirrors (that’ll be annoying when you’re lane-
before. His outrageous vehicles are about making
splitting through traffic to get to work), and the levers are
statements, visual and mechanical, and in that sense the
reverse-action, because screw you, he’s Ludovic
LM 847 has plenty to say.
Lazareth.
The heart of the matter is a ludicrous motor: the 4.7-liter,
Not a bolt on this crazy creation is anything like any other
32-valve V8 from the Maserati Quattroporte, a 620
bike you’ve seen this side of the show-only Dodge
newton-meter bone crusher that puts out exactly 4.7
Tomahawk. From the winged front lamps, to the rude,
times the old horsepower limit.
stout air intake behind the screen, to the incongruous
footboards, to the fact that it runs a single-speed
One rear tire was never going to be enough to put 470
transmission with a hydraulic coupling and electric
horsepower to the ground, so Lazareth supplies two,
reverse, it’s a complete original until you notice he’s stuck
each with its own chain drive, and each on its own hefty
a Ducati Panigale tail section on it, virtually unchanged,
single-sided swingarm.
and somehow made it work visually despite the fact that
it’s fixed to a 2.6 meter long, 400 kg, tilting quad bike.
The obvious choice here would be to suspend each
wheel individually, but Lazareth has no time for obvious
I can’t even imagine how a human would fit on it, let
choices. He mounts a TFX rear shock transversely, in a
alone find the throttle stop on an engine so violently
fashion that looks like it will not only damp bump-
powerful. But I love it, and I’d give it a go in a second,
handling movements that affect both rear wheels, but
and I’d be delighted to hand it back half an hour later,
also any motion that moves one wheel relative to the
wide-eyed and trembling, to this French Dr. Frankenstein.
other – for example, cornering lean angle changes. How
The scariest thing is, he’s surely elbow deep in something
this works dynamically on the road, who knows?
even more bizarre as we speak.
At the front end, there’s another two giant single sided
swingarms, each featuring its own hub-steered front
wheel with a Buell-style rim-mounted brake. This time,
each gets its own shock, as well as an unsprung weight
figure that’d probably be admirable on a B-double truck.

Between the front and rear wheels are split carbon fiber
aerodynamic shields that work together when the bike is
upright to give the impression of a third tire … Or that the
whole monstrous thing is just one two-foot wide piece of
rubber.

One hint as to how hard that front end is to steer comes
from the gigantic width of the handlebar poking up out
of the airbox. Lazareth has been quoted as saying if he
can’t make something work beautifully, he’ll hide it, so
lord knows what that steering mechanism looks like under
there. The bars are made even wider with the addition of