Benelli dealerships across the country have started taking bookings for the 249cc single-cylinder Leoncino 250 as well
The Leoncino 250 shares its underpinnings and borrows visual styling cues from the bigger, Leoncino 500 already on sale in India. The 250 sports a scrambler-styled design with a single-seat layout, teardrop shaped fuel tank and a number tyre-hugging number plate holder. It also boasts a circular LED headlamp with DRLs, a horizontal cylindrical tail lamp at the rear, along with LED indicators.
The Leoncino 250 is based on a tubular trellis-styled chassis. The engine on offer is a BS6-compliant single-cylinder 249cc motor that churns out 25.8 PS of peak power at 10,500 rpm and 21.2 Nm of torque at 9,000 rpm and is paired to a 6-speed transmission. The power figures have gone down a bit from the previous 28.5 PS/21.6 Nm seen on the TNT 25, the bike it replaces in the Benelli lineup.
The bike comes with 17-inch alloy wheels with 110/70 and 150/60 section tyres at the front and back respectively. The wheels are clamped by 41 mm inverted forks at the front and preload-adjustable mono-shock at the rear. It also gets petal disc brakes on both the wheels (280 mm front, 240 mm rear), along with dual-channel ABS.
Benelli offers a digital LCD instrument cluster along with a uniquely designed tachometer, compared to the Leoncino 500’s analogue unit. The three paint-schemes on offer are Italian Red, Titanium Grey and Pearl Brown.
The bike that the Leoncino 250 is based on, the bigger Leoncino 500 was launched in India at a price of Rs. 4.79 lakh (ex-showroom) earlier this year. But, the price of the 249cc model has been kept down at Rs. 2.5 lakh (ex-showroom), which makes it compete against Honda CB300R and the KTM 390 Duke.
However, it will directly rival the Royal Enfield Thunderbird 500X and the Bajaj Dominar 400. Benelli has already started taking bookings for the Leoncino 250 for a token amount of Rs. 6,000, with deliveries set to commence by the end of this month.