Bultaco, Europe's No. 2 Motorcycle Maker in Spain... Until It Was Beaten by Japan

In May 1958, engineer Francisco Xavier “Paco” Bultó walked out of Montesa, the company he had co-founded, over a single disagreement: management wanted to pull the brand out of racing. Part of the racing team left with him. In a farmhouse in Cunit, with barely twenty mechanics, they built a new motorcycle around one idea — “the market follows the checkered flag” — and named it after him: Bultó plus Paco. That's how Bultaco was born. For almost two decades it beat the best brands on the planet. Sammy Miller's Sherpa T won the Scottish Six Days Trial in 1965 — the first non-British bike, and a two-stroke, ever to do it. The Metralla Mk2 topped 160 km/h and took first and second in its class at the Isle of Man TT in 1967. In 1973, Jim Pomeroy won the Spanish Motocross Grand Prix on a Pursang, the first American to win a world championship round on European soil. And in 1977, Bultaco was Spain's largest motorcycle maker and Europe's second, building around 22,000 machines a year, nearly half of them for export. Six years later, the factory in Sant Adrià de Besòs shut its doors for good. This is the documentary of the story of Bultaco: how a brand born in a farmhouse beat the British in the mud and conquered the United States; why the Japanese factories, the oil crisis, the strikes of 1978 and a merger that never happened left it with no time to change; what happened when the Bultó family walked away and the workers tried to keep the lines running as a cooperative; and why, after a failed electric comeback in 2014, the raised thumb is back on a brand-new motorcycle in 2026. 📌 Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 1:29 The split from Montesa 2:26 The Masía and the Tralla 101 3:30 Conquering the world 6:43 The world changed 9:21 The fall 11:53 Back from the dead: the 2014 comeback 13:06 The 2026 comeback Did you ever own a Bultaco — a Sherpa, a Metralla, a Pursang? Did you race one, or watch them at Montjuïc? If you lived through that era, tell me your story in the comments. Subscribe to Lost Industrial Kingdoms to find out how other industrial giants that once seemed unbeatable fell. #Bultaco #BusinessHistory #LostIndustrialKingdoms