power of 52 hp at 10,000 rev/min and a maximum speed of 230 km/h. This motorcycle was intended to compete in the 1940 season to try to bissare the Benelli's success in the 1939 Isle of Man TT Lightweight 250 cc race, but the outbreak of the Second World War will frustrate all efforts and this solution (banned in the post-war period) will never be used in official competitions. After World War II At the end of the conflict, much of the factory was destroyed, the equipment dispersed or damaged and it took three or four years to restart the business in a situation of precariousness and misery. To replenish the scarce financial resources, the Benelli acquired a thousand motorcycles abandoned by the belligerent armies on the battlefields to refurbish them for civil use. Giuseppe Benelli, after irreconcilable disputes with his brothers about productive strategies, split from the company to found first the BBC Automobili in 1946 and after MotoBi in 1952. The management of Benelli factory will pass to the second brother Giovanni who, although not having the design talents of his older brother, had great organizational skills having always managed the productive apparatus of the company. Under his direction Giovanni provides designers with the guidelines of the model of rebirth: the new motorcycle must be light, reliable and cheap. This is how the Letizia model was born, equipped with a two-stroke engine (cheaper than 4-stroke) of 98 cm³ with four bench bearings, mounted on an essential frame, but elastic on both axes. ″Letizia″ will be the motorcycle forerunner of the most famous model of the Benelli postwar: the ″Leoncino″ (little lion). It was produced from 1950 to 1960 in about 45,000 units, the most common motorization was the 125 cm³ 2 stroke, but also 150 cm³ for the version "three wheel" and 125 cm³ 4 stroke with distribution to "cascade of gears", immediately abandoned solution for reliability problems. Since the 1960s, at a time of major market crisis in Italy, Benelli has been saving its balance with exports to the US. In the sixties he chose two different routes to sell overseas: via the importer Cosmopolitan and with the Montgomery Ward and presented the following models: Tornado 650: the twin-cylinder maxi was marketed first in the US and then in Europe. The superstructures are completely different, but the peculiarity is the chassis type Metisse, wanted by Steve McQueen.