The French have a great expression for, well,.. everything

I was reading a post on Hell for Leather earlier this morning, about the implications of the 'frameless' Ducati MotoGP bike's failure on the soon-to-be-released 1199 production bike. It was better than the average motorcycle blog post, but one sentence stuck out...

Michael Czysz credits himself for perfecting this arrangement on his stillborn C1 GP bike...

You know, the French have a great expression that, loosely translated = The only things that are new are those that have been forgotten.

I can't possibly know what part of this design Czysz claims to have invented, but 'frameless' motorcycles have been around a long time. Phil Vincent's famous twins used the engine as a stressed member and had only a rudimentary 'spine' bolted across the tops of the cylinder heads.

More recently, John Britten's V-1000 was a frameless design. So there's nothing particularly new or innovative about cantilevering the steering head off the motor. At the other end, the MZ Supermono Cup race bikes pivoted the swing arm through the cases. And my friend James Parker has designed bikes that are even more frameless than any of those examples. So what's the innovation here? Building that front subframe as a monococque and using it as the air box? Maybe, but quite a few very conventional bikes draw engine air through the castings of the steering head, so the idea is only as big as expanding the volume of that channel, to make it a resonating chamber.

Is there something about those electric motorcycle entrepreneur types that makes them especially prone to claiming to have invented ideas they've, at best, repurposed?