Retro Meets Neo With This Italian/Chinese Scrambler

[advrider]

Fantic Caballero: It sounds like the name of a fizzy drink, the kind special-imported from Italy, made with real fruit and sold on a separate shelf from all the other diabetes-causing soda at your local grocery store. But in reality, the Fantic Caballero 500 Rally Explorer is a new scrambler that’s hit the market in Europe, with equal parts neo and retro styling, and on the surface, it looks like it might have ADV potential.

Who’s Fantic?

Fantic is an Italian moto-marque with quite a bit of history behind it, starting its business in 1968. In those days, it made its bikes in-house and achieved some amount of success on both the sales floor and the fields of trials competition. After selling a pile of bikes in the moped wars of the 1980s, Fantic was revived around 2014 by Italian investors, including ex-Piaggio Group insiders. Since then, it’s bought Minarelli from Yamaha, and also sells some bikes with engines from Chinese manufacturer Zongshen.

What’s the Fantic Caballero Rally Explorer 500?

As retro styling remains popular, Fantic’s put together this scrambler, which is just going on sale in the UK with a £7649 price tag, including taxes and fees (roughly equivalent to $9,100 US). The Rally Explorer is a sub-model based on the Fantic Caballero 500 scrambler, which hit the EU market in 2019. It runs a large Zongshen-built 450cc single-cylinder, liquid-cooled and putting out 39 horsepower at the crank—well within the range of some of the larger Japanese thumpers. Unlike some other self-professed scramblers, this machine comes with a monoshock in back; this is contrary to The Retro Look, but generally offers superior performance with less weight than a dual shock setup.

The Rally Explorer variant takes things a bit further than the standard Caballero with a high-mount front fender, cross-braced handlebars, a small flyscreen, headlight guard, and a white and bronze paint job that’s supposed to look straight from the ’70s. While it’s still running a 19-inch front rim and 17-inch rear, those wheels have Michelin Anakee Wild tires, and there’s an Arrow exhaust (an unusually high-spec part on one of these bikes).

Looks good, like it might be a lot more ADV-capable than just about anything else in this category of budget scrams. The question comes down to, what about the suspension? That’s Fantic’s own in-house design, with compression and preload adjustability on fork and shock. If Fantic did a good job, this bike could be a real winner for someone looking for an affordable, practical machine with capability for bad pavement and gravel roads. If the suspension isn’t up to snuff, then this would be just another styling venture.

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