TM Racing

Two Friends, One Workshop, and a Small Factory in Pesaro

Claudio Flenghi and Francesco Battistelli grew up together in Pesaro, on Italy's Adriatic coast, and shared the kind of motorcycle obsession that eventually stops being a hobby and starts becoming a plan. Neither man had built a motorcycle for a living. Both had simply spent enough years around bikes and racing to think they could do it better themselves. In 1976 that idea became TM Engines, and by 1977 Flenghi and Battistelli had left their jobs behind to build the first complete TM motorcycle out of Flenghi's workshop.

The name itself is a small piece of family history rather than an acronym for anything technical or corporate: TM comes from the first letters of the founders' sons' names, Thomas and Mirko. Within the company the two men split duties along lines that stuck to their reputations for years afterward — Flenghi handling engines, and Battistelli handling frames, with sources referring to him at times as "Mr. Frame" and at times as "Mr. Chassis." Whichever phrase you prefer, the division of labor was the same: one man built what made the bike go, the other built what kept it pointed in the right direction.

They debuted their machine at the 1977 Milan Motorcycle Show, and the reception surprised even them. Demand was strong enough that the small operation quickly outgrew Flenghi's workshop, and TM moved into a proper factory in Pesaro's industrial zone — a modest but real manufacturing operation, born almost by accident out of two friends' shared enthusiasm.

The First Machines and the People Who Proved Them

TM's first production motorcycles reached the market in 1978 and 1979, and almost from the start the company understood that racing results, not showroom polish, would be what sold bikes to serious riders. In 1977 a young rider from Pesaro named Gastone Serafini was given a TM to race, and he became far more than a test pilot — Serafini worked directly with Battistelli on development, pushing the machines toward the kind of performance that would define the brand. By 1978 the Serafini family was formally part of the organization, and TM had reached a production run of 200 motocross machines, a serious number for a company barely two years old.

In 1979 TM brought on Tommaso Lolli to work alongside Serafini, and that same year the company built its first enduro machines, broadening beyond pure motocross into the discipline that would become just as central to the marque's identity. Word spread quickly among European riders that TM machines were built with unusual care — tight tolerances, quality components, and engines that held together under real racing stress. For a small Italian manufacturer competing against much larger Japanese factories, that reputation for durability and finish was the only currency that mattered.

The Golden Era: Small Engines, Big Results

The 1980s and 1990s were TM's peak years, and the company built its name on a category that dominated European motocross and enduro at the time: 80cc machines built around 125cc-scale chassis. TM's approach — a full-size frame carrying an 85cc engine — produced bikes that were exceptionally light for their power, and for a stretch of years TM's small-bore engines were considered among the strongest and most reliable in the class. There is conflicting information about just how far that dominance extended — some sources describe TM winning across nearly every 80cc race series of the era, including strong results at events like the International Six-Day Enduro and the Italian Championship, but the specifics are hard to pin down with confidence, and claims about particular podium sweeps or championship placings should be read with some caution.

The 1990s brought the company's most visible international racing exposure. Alex Puzar rode TM machinery to a second-place finish in the 125cc World Championship in 1997 and third overall in 1998, at a time when the TM 125cc engine was regarded in Europe as one of the strongest performers in its displacement class — a genuine engineering credential for a manufacturer of TM's size, competing directly against the Japanese factories and larger European rivals. TM's engine work was respected enough that other manufacturers came calling: through the late 1990s, up until 1999, GasGas used TM engines across its own model range, a quiet but telling vote of confidence from a competitor.

Racing as Identity

Racing was never a marketing exercise for TM — it was closer to the whole point of the company, and that thread runs continuously from Gastone Serafini's earliest development work through to the present day. Alex Puzar's late-1990s 125cc World Championship results remain the clearest high-water mark of TM's Grand Prix motocross era, but the brand kept a presence in international racing well beyond that.

In more recent years, TM Racing fielded a Grand Prix motocross effort in the 2018 MXGP series with Max Nagl and Samuele Bernardini, both riders doubling as development testers for the factory — a very Pesaro way of doing things, using the racetrack as the engineering department. In enduro, TM has had Eero Remes competing in the FIM World Enduro Series, and the marque can point to world titles across several classes over the years, including a 125cc world championship, a 300cc two-stroke world championship, and a 300cc four-stroke title in 2017. TM's enduro program also produced world championship success with Loïc Larrieu and Andrea Verona; sources differ on the exact years and classes involved, with some crediting both riders as world champions for TM around 2019 and 2020, in the E2 and E1 classes respectively, so those specifics are best treated as approximate rather than settled.

TM's competition reach extended to the United States as well, where Robby Schott of Bakersfield, California, started out as a TM customer in 2016 and won the brand's first WORCS title that same year in the Supermini class, later moving up to race TM machinery in WORCS Pro 2 Lights — a small but genuine foothold for the Italian marque in American off-road racing.

The Bikes That Built the Reputation

TM's early 125cc motocross machines set the template the company has followed ever since: modest production numbers, but engines and chassis worked over with a level of attention that larger manufacturers, chasing economies of scale, couldn't always match. The TM EN 250 became something of a fixture in the enduro world, valued for a strong engine and handling that held up in genuinely difficult terrain rather than just on a showroom floor.

By 1990, TM's motocross machines had visibly absorbed some of the era's Japanese styling cues — that year's model bore a resemblance to the contemporary Honda CR125 and Suzuki RM125 — but TM kept its own details, including an oversized aluminum fuel tank and distinctive air channels feeding into the airbox. It was a small company borrowing what worked while still insisting on its own engineering signature.

Today TM builds around 1,300 motorcycles a year, a figure that tells you everything about the scale the company operates at — a fraction of what a mainstream manufacturer produces, by design rather than misfortune. The current range spans two-stroke and four-stroke motocross, enduro, flat track, and supermoto machines, along with shifter kart engines, and the four-stroke lineup has grown to include 250, 300, 450, and 530cc displacements.

Ownership: A Company That Stayed in the Family

TM's ownership history is unusually stable for a small European motorcycle manufacturer, and that stability starts with a split. In 1982, Francesco Battistelli decided to leave the company he'd co-founded. Rather than the business fracturing, Gastone Serafini — the rider who'd been central to TM's development since 1977 — stepped in alongside Flenghi and then took ownership of the company outright that same year. Serafini has owned TM ever since, a tenure now stretching more than four decades.

That continuity matters more than it might seem. TM has never been folded into a larger corporate group, never been bought out by one of the major manufacturing conglomerates that have absorbed so many smaller European marques over the decades. It has remained a small, independent, family-run operation, and it has avoided the bankruptcies and financial near-misses that have claimed or crippled plenty of its contemporaries. TM simply kept building bikes, at its own modest scale, under the same ownership, in the same town.

TM Racing Today

TM Moto Srl Unipersonale still operates out of Via Fano in Pesaro, not far from where Flenghi and Battistelli built that first machine in 1977. In the United States, the brand is represented by Ralf Schmidt of Gravity TM Racing USA, giving American riders and collectors a route to a marque that never chased mass distribution the way its larger rivals did.

The current lineup runs from 85cc to 300cc two-strokes and 250cc to 450cc four-strokes, across motocross, enduro, and supermoto configurations — a boutique catalog for a boutique manufacturer. TM has built its identity around materials and components chosen with what admirers call an almost obsessive attention to detail, sourcing top-tier outsourced parts rather than cutting costs at scale. The result is a motorcycle that rides closer to a factory racing machine than almost anything else available off a showroom floor, which is precisely the appeal for the small, serious audience TM has always built for.

TM Racing remains a niche name next to the Japanese and larger European manufacturers, and it has never pretended otherwise. But among riders and collectors who know what they're looking at, TM's combination of racing pedigree, engineering care, and unbroken family ownership has earned it a standing that far outsizes its production numbers — a small Pesaro factory still doing, in essence, what two friends set out to do in 1976.