Macbor
In a motorcycle shop in Barcelona in 1971, a former racer named Jaime Bordoy was selling other people's motorcycles. He'd already made a name for himself on two wheels through the 1950s and 60s, and he knew the business from the inside as well as from the saddle. What he did not have yet, and would not have for another twenty-eight years, was a marque of his own. That gap between the shop and the badge is the whole shape of the Macbor story: a family business that spent decades in the trade before deciding to put its own name on a fuel tank.
Origins: a racer turns dealer
Jaime Bordoy was born in Barcelona on April 2, 1936, and got into two wheels the way a lot of Spanish riders of his generation did, first through cycling, then through motorcycles once speed and endurance racing opened up to him in 1957. He rode Mondial, Montesa, and Bultaco machinery through amateur and national championships in the late 1950s and early 1960s, picking up a 125cc subchampionship in 1959 and, in 1961, the 125cc class win at the 24 Hours of Montjuïc, finishing fifth overall in the process. That same year he was crowned Spanish Endurance Champion in the 125cc category, riding a Ducati with Manuel Traver. He also became one of the pioneers of trial riding in Spain, making the pilgrimage to the Scottish Six Days of Trial, and at one point broke a run of 48 consecutive wins by Pere Pi on a Montesa Cota 247 — a result still cited in Spanish trial circles as one of the notable upsets of the era.
By the time he founded Motos Bordoy in 1971, Bordoy had already built the reputation and the contacts that would define the business for the next thirty years. He had ridden for and worked with Bultaco, and Motos Bordoy grew into the Spanish importer for a run of serious European names: Malaguti, Cagiva, Ducati, MV Agusta, Husqvarna. It was a distribution business first, built on relationships rather than manufacturing, and it stayed that way for most of three decades.
Building the Macbor name
The idea of putting the family's own badge on a motorcycle didn't arrive until 1999, when Jaime Bordoy, his sons Albert and Jordi, and partner Josep Lluis Merlos launched Macbor. The name itself is a small piece of family shorthand: "Mc," son of, plus "Bor," for Bordoy. Given everything the elder Bordoy had done in racing and distribution by that point, you might expect the new marque to come out swinging with performance machinery. It didn't. Macbor's first products were children's motorbikes, a modest and commercially sensible starting point for a family that understood the retail side of the business better than almost anyone in Spain.
That focus on kids' bikes held for the better part of two decades. It wasn't until 2017 that Macbor made its real pivot, unveiling a range of adult-sized motorcycles in Barcelona built around 125cc and 250cc singles. Early models like the Stormer R, a retro-flavored naked, the more contemporary Shifter MC1, and the small adventure-styled XR1 gave the brand its first real presence in the market that mattered — Spain's crowded, competitive lightweight segment, where price, styling, and dealer support count for as much as outright performance.
The rapid climb: 2019–2021
What happened next was fast by any measure. In 2019, Macbor had become the third-largest player in the Spanish 125cc motorcycle market — a genuinely striking result for a brand that had only been selling adult machines for two years. In 2020, it went further and became the outright leader of that segment, a claim backed by the company's own business timeline and corroborated in contemporary trade coverage.
The same year, Macbor made its move into bigger displacement with the Montana XR5 500, its first adventure-style twin-cylinder motorcycle and a clear signal that the brand wasn't content to stay a 125cc specialist. In 2021 it followed with the Eight Mile 500 Scrambler and a Street sibling — modern, accessibly priced machines built around visual character rather than outright spec-sheet bragging rights, in keeping with the brand's whole approach. Around the same period came the Johnny Be Good and Lord Martin, both leaning into classic and cruiser styling cues, alongside the smaller Rockster 125 and the mid-sized Rockster 410.
None of this reads like a company chasing lap times. Macbor's growth through this stretch was built on reading the Spanish market correctly: riders who wanted style, a reasonable price, and a bike that didn't feel like an afterthought, in categories the bigger Japanese and European manufacturers were often willing to treat as secondary. It worked well enough that by the early 2020s Macbor had gone from a children's-bike sideline to a legitimate name in the adult segment inside a handful of years.
Racing: the founder's legacy, not the brand's
It's straightforward enough to say here: Macbor the manufacturer has no meaningful racing program or championship record of its own. The racing pedigree in this story belongs to Jaime Bordoy the rider, not to the motorcycles that carry his family's contracted name. His results on Mondial, Montesa, Bultaco, and Ducati machinery in the 1950s and 60s, and his trial exploits against riders like Pere Pi, are part of the folklore around the man who eventually founded the company — but Macbor as a brand has built its identity around accessible road bikes rather than competition. For a marque with this much racing DNA sitting one generation back, that's a curious omission, and it may say something about where the Bordoy family decided the real business opportunity was: not on the track, but in Spanish dealerships selling middleweight bikes at the right price.
Ownership, succession, and steady hands
Macbor has never been sold, merged, or forced through bankruptcy. It has stayed exactly what it started as: a project of the Motos Bordoy Group, family-owned since 1971, with the Macbor brand itself dating to 1999. That continuity matters in a segment where small manufacturers often get swallowed by larger conglomerates or fold outright when a recession hits.
Jaime Bordoy died in early March 2024 at age 87, born April 2, 1936. He lived to see the small motorcycle shop he opened in 1971 become a manufacturer with real market share in its home country, which is more than most founders in this business get to witness. His sons Albert and Jordi have continued running the company, keeping the family structure intact through the transition.
Macbor today
The brand's expansion beyond Spain has been deliberate and fairly recent. Macbor established itself domestically in 2017 and moved into Portugal in 2020. In 2025 it pushed into France, and by most accounts built a network of more than 40 dealerships there within about six months — a fast rollout for a brand still working out its identity outside the Iberian peninsula. From there, the company has said it intends to keep building across Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, describing its approach as centered on passion, authenticity, and commitment to riders — the sort of language every manufacturer uses, but one that in Macbor's case is at least consistent with a company that has genuinely grown from nothing to a market leader inside a single generation.
The current lineup sits at six models, with the company signaling at EICMA that it plans to grow to nine by 2026. Among the additions mentioned for that expansion is a Rockster 710, which would become the brand's largest-displacement motorcycle and the fourth entry in the Rockster family alongside the 410, the Flat 125 Evo, and the 125 Evo — though details on that model remain unconfirmed, and it's unclear how firm the timeline is. An Eight Mile 125 Evo Scrambler has also been mentioned as part of the next generation of the range.
Macbor is not, and doesn't pretend to be, a heritage brand in the way that word gets used around Bultaco or Montesa, the very marques Jaime Bordoy raced and sold decades ago. It's 26 years old as a badge, barely a decade into building motorcycles adults actually want to ride, and it holds essentially no standing yet among classic-bike collectors. But that's a fair trade for what it has built instead: a genuinely Catalan motorcycle company that climbed from kids' bikes to market leadership in the Spanish 125cc class in about three years, expanded into 500cc twins, and is now pushing its dealer network across half a dozen European countries. Give it another twenty years and those early Montana XR1s and Eight Mile 500s may well be the bikes people start hunting down at Spanish swap meets. For now, Macbor's real story is simpler than nostalgia — it's a family business that finally decided to build the bikes it had spent thirty years selling for everyone else.