- 8 minutes ago
Long before the Ducati Panigale V4 the American Ducati importer convinced Ducati and legendary engine designer Dr. Taglioni to build a 1200cc V-4 that made 100 hp in 1962. It was designed to chase after sales in the lucrative police bike market in America. It was a 90-degree V-4 with four carburetors and very American styling. Join Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer as they explore the origins of this engine and motorcycle. The Ducati V-4 you never heard of!
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00:00:00Hey, it's the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Horner, the Editor-in-Chief. I'm with Kevin Cameron, our Technical Editor.
00:00:06Today we're discussing the Ducati V4 you didn't know about.
00:00:11The 70? 70-year-old Ducati? 65?
00:00:15Yeah.
00:00:16It's a very old design, but it was a V4 Ducati Apollo.
00:00:2260 years, yeah.
00:00:2460 years. Short stroke, big bore, pushrods? What?
00:00:30What in the world? It was never produced, and there's prototypes. There's one that's floated around. I believe it's back with Ducati, and I think it went on tour is all I'm saying.
00:00:42And yeah, so Kevin, tell us what you know about the Apollo.
00:00:46Well, first thing to remember is that Ducati was not the powerful, well-established technology leader that it is today when our narrative begins around 1959.
00:01:03Ducati had made radio parts. They made Cuccillo, the little puppy runabout. They had elaborated their motorcycle product because there was a demand for it, and they even went racing.
00:01:25So Fabio Taglioni, the revered, rightfully so, revered tech chief of this company came from a racing background.
00:01:40I think he was at Mondial for a time and probably didn't get along with the management.
00:01:48This is one of the problems of creative people.
00:01:53They have an idea, and someone says, what nonsense, and they leave.
00:01:58Friggin' artists.
00:01:59They're not going to take that. That's right.
00:02:01So he saw the problem of the time, and it was a really big problem in the 50s, valve spring failure, because a valve spring, a helical coil valve spring, is a torsion bar that has been wound up into a helix.
00:02:26So when you compress it, you're twisting the wire, and the most sophisticated steel that they had was from electric furnace ingots, selected parts of the ingot.
00:02:46Because just like when you weld something, as the weld cools and solidifies, the impurities in the melt are driven to the center of the weld.
00:02:59The same thing is true of ingots.
00:03:02So you take a selected part of the ingot, and you can have a cleaner steel, free to a greater degree of crack nucleating impurities.
00:03:14So Taglioni decided that he would develop an idea that had been used for a long time by a variety of companies, but never with much sophistication until Mercedes-Benz drove the valves of their straight-eight racing car, W196, with it.
00:03:42And what this does, of course, is it opens the valve in a conventional way with a finger fall, light as can be.
00:03:53And instead of letting a spring hold the valve train against the cam profile as closing begins, which requires the spring to do the work.
00:04:06There is a second cam lobe, which is complementary to the first, and there's an L-shaped closing lever, which physically pulls the valve closed.
00:04:18Now, as you can imagine, this takes some mechanical precision, because to make two profiles with pivoted lever followers that have radius pads on them, that's a lot of geometry.
00:04:36We weren't taught that in freshman math.
00:04:40It is pretty neat, the Desmo cam, the opening cam, in particular, can be quite narrow, because it doesn't have to push against a heavy spring.
00:04:50Yeah.
00:04:50So they're very blade-like.
00:04:52It's neat.
00:04:53Yes, indeed.
00:04:53And, of course, there are cam lobes on spring engines that are wide where they lift and narrow where they close or narrow where the pressure is least.
00:05:06So, yes, that's a well-known way of doing things.
00:05:10So, what he did was to develop this until he could make it reliable, and they built racing motorcycles that employed Desmodromic valves.
00:05:25Desmodromic sort of means something like chain-operated or operated by direct link, which distinguishes it from pushed closed by a spring.
00:05:36And bear in mind that valves do not snap shut, because if they did, their heads would come off very quickly.
00:05:47They're brought rapidly close to the seat during the closing process and then decelerated at over 1,000 times the force of gravity, in the case of a race engine, and placed on the seat.
00:06:02Gently as possible.
00:06:04Yes, because the valve is – think of a valve.
00:06:08It's a disc with a stick in the middle of it.
00:06:10The stick gets to guide it and transmit the opening and closing forces.
00:06:16And the disc on the end is like a sewer cover that you drive your car across when you go to town.
00:06:22It's got a 45-degree seat, and it's like a trampoline.
00:06:28The stick, when the valve is closing, the stick gets up to a good speed.
00:06:33Suddenly, the disc stops against the seat, but the stick tries to keep going.
00:06:38So, ba-doing, the valve is lifted back off of its seat by the elasticity of the valve head.
00:06:44But anyway, that's interfering with our story.
00:06:47What happened was Taglioni developed this wonderful system and made it reliable.
00:06:53And around 1959, I believe it is, the Berliner brothers, Joe and Mike, down there in New Jersey, were importing European motorcycles.
00:07:10And they, in fact, were responsible for a large part of Ducati sales by bringing those motorcycles in.
00:07:18And I remember seeing, when I was still in the clutches of higher education, a lovely Ducati single for which I yearned.
00:07:30It was a beautiful thing.
00:07:32So, that was their business.
00:07:35It was, they built singles, they built sporting desmodromic singles.
00:07:41So, in 1959, the Berliner brothers are looking at some, it's referred to vaguely as a legal judgment,
00:07:51that they wanted the Harley Davidson monopoly on police bike sales to be brought.
00:08:05They wanted there to be competitors.
00:08:08Well, there was a spec, right?
00:08:09The spec was written almost to exclude, to describe a Harley.
00:08:1516-inch wheels, and, you know, displacement had to be X, and it had to have,
00:08:19it had to have the tires, and it had to have a 60-inch wheelbase, I believe.
00:08:26There was a long, you know, and it basically just drew a box that said,
00:08:30hello, Harley Davidson, because there was no Indian to fight with them.
00:08:33So, because the Indian had closed in 53.
00:08:36What do you look for in business?
00:08:38There was discussion.
00:08:42Some people claim that Berliners shipped two police Harleys over to Ducati to study it.
00:08:51And by 61, supposedly the Berliner said, well, yeah, we could contribute toward the development costs for this product,
00:09:00because we think there could be substantial sales.
00:09:04So, Taglioni got busy on this, and he wasn't going to do a huge V-twin,
00:09:18because it wouldn't do what Ducati has made itself so good at doing,
00:09:25which is to produce its horsepower by RPM.
00:09:29Now, of course, you have to have good cylinder filling,
00:09:34which means you have to have a high-flowing intake and exhaust port,
00:09:37and you have to have good combustion,
00:09:39which means the combustion chamber can't be filled with a great piston dome
00:09:43that's sticking up right in the way of the fiery wind that propels.
00:09:50So, pardon me.
00:09:53Yes.
00:09:54That just came to me.
00:09:55So, what did he do?
00:09:59He drew a 90-degree V4.
00:10:05Well, okay, four cylinders means shorter strokes than if you had two great big cylinders,
00:10:13which means the engine can rev up higher, higher than Harley's usual, in those days, 5,000 peak RPM.
00:10:20And why 90 degrees?
00:10:26Because he knew that a 90-degree V-twin, where two rods share a common crank pin,
00:10:36can be given perfect primary balance simply by adding weights to the crankshaft.
00:10:43Now, there are people who, quite naturally, I suppose,
00:10:49imagine that Dr. Taglioni came up with this idea.
00:10:53Well, he did apply it.
00:10:55It didn't originate with him.
00:10:57There had been 90-degree V-twins for years and years.
00:11:00And I jumped up from my keyboard and went to the A-book case and pulled out Liston's 1942 classic on aircraft engine design.
00:11:13And in the chapter on engine vibration and balance, he describes a 90-degree V-twin with completely balanced primary shaking force.
00:11:27And this is done by balancing all of one cylinder's reciprocating weight.
00:11:35Piston, rings, wrist pin, and the small end of the rod.
00:11:40You weigh the rod horizontally.
00:11:43The weight resting on one scale is the small end weight.
00:11:47The weight resting on the other scale is the big end weight.
00:11:51So we're interested in the small end weight.
00:11:53It's an arbitrary distinction.
00:11:54So this made the resulting engine very smooth.
00:12:01And everyone was impressed by this, including the Berliner brothers and others who saw it running.
00:12:08I think they got prototypes going.
00:12:13But this was an engine that was difficult to package.
00:12:17Because if you have two cylinders at right angles and then you raise one by 15 degrees, which incidentally was the number chosen when the Imola winning bevel drive bike ridden by Paul Smart and Bruno Spaggiari was built, which was a V-twin.
00:12:43And Taglioni gave the V-4 a horizontally split crankcase, whereas the singles have vertically split crankcases.
00:12:57And, of course, this is because this is a three-bearing crankshaft.
00:13:01What's going to support what's going to support the middle bearing if you've split it vertically?
00:13:08So he also gave it five speeds.
00:13:12People have talked about this.
00:13:13Oh, it's so ahead of its time.
00:13:16He gave it five speeds because he felt he had to.
00:13:19It had a high top speed of 120 miles an hour, and yet it had to heave its 600-pound bulk into motion without a lot of clutch slip.
00:13:34So the fewer speeds you have, the larger the RPM drop when you upshift from one gear to the next.
00:13:43Talioni knew that with that high top speed and the need for a low starting gear, he needed an extra gear in there.
00:13:53Did he invent the five speeds?
00:13:55Certainly not.
00:13:56Because in 1963 or so, he laid out and ultimately built an in-line four-cylinder 125cc racer, which revved to 14,000 RPM and made 23 horsepower.
00:14:15It had an eight-speed transmission.
00:14:17And, of course, all those Hondas that were racing in the classic 1960s Grand Prixs, the number of gearbox speeds just went on and on and on, particularly for the two-strokes where the power band could go by and you wouldn't notice it.
00:14:39So this five-speed thing was a rational and correct decision.
00:14:45So was a horizontally split crankcase because it had three main bearings.
00:14:50The crank pins were disposed at 180 degrees in the interest of an even firing order.
00:14:58This engine, even when the front and rear wheels were rolled as close to it as their function permitted,
00:15:11like, for example, the telescopic fork not only rises, it moves backwards somewhat.
00:15:18And normally a swing arm, the two beams are joined by some twist-resisting structure to prevent the rear wheel from tilting to side to side as you go over bumps in a corner.
00:15:32But the wheelbase callout, they gave the thing 61.2 or 3-inch wheelbase, which is not that far from the Imola winner in 1972 because it faced the very same problems.
00:15:53Plus, it was a Desmo.
00:15:55In this case, Taglioni chose pushrods and rockers because they don't rise far above the valve.
00:16:05So they make the engine both less tall and less long.
00:16:12Well, it's a big, big deal.
00:16:16When Yamaha did one of their big V-twin star cruisers a few years ago, many years ago now,
00:16:24I was on the launch and they were talking about why they chose to do pushrod and rocker,
00:16:28and it was to limit the height of the engine.
00:16:30This is a very long stroke engine.
00:16:31It's a pretty good-looking motor.
00:16:33So I asked the engine engineer when the flathead was coming, and thankfully, he chuckled a little.
00:16:40So then we could make it lower.
00:16:43But yeah, it's a great point about the pushrod and rocker.
00:16:46And I think also, if you're trying to sell this motorcycle to the American market, look, I mean, we're still making flatheads.
00:16:53Harley's still making flatheads.
00:16:55Yeah, at that time.
00:16:56Yeah.
00:16:56You know, like just releasing the flathead, just saying no more to flatheads was a thing.
00:17:03So imagine going to a police department in Iowa or Wisconsin or South Carolina and saying,
00:17:09no, no, we have desmodromic overhead cams for your police bike.
00:17:13What the hell?
00:17:14You know, like, how am I supposed to fix that?
00:17:17Yeah.
00:17:17Well, also, the rockers had the screw and nut adjusters at the tip bearing against the valve stem.
00:17:25So, reduced to the most serviceable, accessible by the common mechanic form possible.
00:17:34Easy maintenance.
00:17:35Yeah.
00:17:36Just stick your feeler in, turn your nut, turn your adjuster, you're done.
00:17:39Now, from doing what I did as a teenager and trying to measure photographs, it looks like the swing arm on this, on Apollo was just really short, like barely over 15 inches.
00:17:56The swing arm on Ducati's super bike, liquid-cooled eight-valve V-twins, which won so many world super bike championships.
00:18:11Those, where am I going with this?
00:18:17Oh, swing arm length.
00:18:18Oh, well, the problem with those motors was that because of their length, the swing arm could not be longer than 19 inches.
00:18:30And the trend at the time was toward adopting a 24-inch swing arm because it simplified some of the problems in rear suspension.
00:18:41That didn't affect Apollo.
00:18:43Apollo was given twin rear shocks and the telescopic front end, all from Ceriani, supposedly.
00:18:54And the steering head was braced against braking force by means of a rectangular tapered tube welded to the back of it,
00:19:06which descended almost vertically to an engine mount by passing between the front cylinders.
00:19:13And the rest of the chassis was two-liter.
00:19:16Stress member.
00:19:17Yeah, stress member.
00:19:18Engine was a stress member.
00:19:19And it's conventional in so many ways because that's what the specification called for.
00:19:32The specification called for a Harley.
00:19:34So this is an Italian Harley, but made with a difference because it made 100 horsepower at 7,000 RPM.
00:19:45And rev to eight.
00:19:46Yeah.
00:19:478,000.
00:19:48And not so different in a way from what I saw as a graph on the wall in Jerry Branch's, the office just outside the dino room.
00:20:03It described his modifications to Harley's big twin, which caused it to make 100 horsepower at 7,600 RPM.
00:20:15So these things are doable.
00:20:21Anyway, when the prototype was ready for test, it was presumably a Prova plate, meaning test.
00:20:34Prova plates were put on it, and a rider took it out onto the Autostrada and opened her up, see what she'll do.
00:20:44So unfortunately, the 16-inch wheels with what was the Section 5 or 550 inches, they got real hot.
00:20:58And then the bond between the tread and the carcass got tired of doing it, and the tire just came to pieces.
00:21:09And the rider said, the rear wheel is all locked up, all this rubber jammed in everywhere, and I just sort of tried to steer-wrestle the thing to a stop.
00:21:22I'm lucky to be alive.
00:21:23So they detuned it.
00:21:25Melting the tires off it, yeah.
00:21:28Melting the tires right off of it.
00:21:30They cut back to 80 horsepower by reducing the 10 to 1 compression ratio to 8 to 1.
00:21:40They may also have had some cams that were more Harley-Davidson inspired.
00:21:45Harley-Davidson cams for the big twin have tended to begin opening right around top dead center and closing right around bottom dead center,
00:21:54which is a way to make unmatched torque at barely above zero RPM.
00:22:01Because this does not depend on ram filling of the cylinders or any kind of sophisticated dynamics.
00:22:11It's just a pump.
00:22:13The valve opens, sucks the cylinder full, valve closes, compress, ignite, power.
00:22:21Yeah, it's a design consideration that we still see today.
00:22:25Royal Enfield 350 is very much this way.
00:22:29The torque curve at 1,200 RPM is very high.
00:22:33It peaks not that long later and then tapers off as it goes to its, whatever it is, 6,000 RPM redline.
00:22:40Yes.
00:22:40And if you look at a Honda Rebel 300, it's a very Honda power curve.
00:22:46It's much higher.
00:22:47It revs more.
00:22:48And the torque happens higher in the RPM range.
00:22:50It's a design decision.
00:22:54The Honda Goldwing.
00:22:55We would like 108 foot-pounds at 1,200 RPM.
00:22:59How do we make that happen?
00:23:00And that's what they got on our dyno with that big flat six.
00:23:04But if you go to BMWs in line six, the torque peak is much higher.
00:23:07It's a much revvier engine.
00:23:08And they've made a, you know, it's the philosophical choice of like, what are we trying to accomplish?
00:23:13So Ducati, sporting singles, 250 Desmos, 350 Desmos, we're going, no, we're going, we're going to reduce the compression.
00:23:24We're going to actually soften things up so we don't melt the tires off.
00:23:27It's still like 80 horsepower is fabulous.
00:23:30That was too much still.
00:23:32So they cut it back to 65 horsepower and they had a runner.
00:23:35And heaven knows what they did to choke the poor thing off.
00:23:43Well, yeah, the first one was 10 to 1.
00:23:44It had four 32 millimeter remote float Del Ordo carburetors.
00:23:49I wonder how the cops thought about that, the maintenance guy.
00:23:51Some of them were, two of them were vertical.
00:23:54Vertical.
00:23:54I mean, still fairly exotic.
00:23:57So finally, they get it down to 65 horsepower and the tires are, yeah, okay.
00:24:07Yeah, sure.
00:24:08We'll do that.
00:24:10And mind you, the big, the big news hit the industry in 1972 when 100 horsepower, two strokes hit Daytona and they chewed up all the tires that could be found for them.
00:24:26And who won the race for two years during that period of, oh, what do we do next?
00:24:33A little 350 Yamaha twin.
00:24:37And all the rider had to do was exert his normal skill, stay on his pace and wait for the race to come back to him.
00:24:47And Dunlop and Goodyear had to come up with tires, belted bias construction, much wider section, updated, more modern tread compounds to solve this problem, which the Apollo had run into much earlier.
00:25:09So at this point, of course, it's, some time has been consumed and people have looked at this thing and Moto Guzzi came out with a V7 and the teams from the Italian army and police are evaluating motorcycles for their future needs.
00:25:34And they all agreed, and they all agreed, V7, that's for us.
00:25:40And Berliner may have run out of confidence that this was going to sell.
00:25:47And the project was parked.
00:25:50Two prototypes had been built.
00:25:53A lot of stuff had been checked back and forth, two carburetors, four carburetors, different compression ratios and so on.
00:26:01So I'm sure considerable money was invested, but it wasn't going anywhere.
00:26:07The end.
00:26:07Now, this gets reviewed by the kind of positive journalism that we're all familiar with.
00:26:17Oh, what might have been if only they'd gone forward?
00:26:20Oh, it was pointing to the future of the super bike.
00:26:24And that's hogwash.
00:26:26Sorry, guys.
00:26:29Well, I mean, if we could.
00:26:31Yeah, go ahead.
00:26:31It did push Taglioni to the 90-degree self-balancing concept when Ducati did decide to get on the big bike trail and have a product in that market segment.
00:26:46Because 69, CB750, 73, Z1, 903ccs, that's where the market was going then.
00:26:55But it wasn't going that way in 1965.
00:26:59It was Triumph twins and BSA twins and Norton twins, all of which shook your feelings out.
00:27:06By comparison with this 90-degree self-balancing principle, which went on the shelf.
00:27:16Then in the very early 80s came Dr. Taglioni's second V4.
00:27:24The Bipanta, B-I-P-A-N-T-A-H, four Panta cylinders on a V4 crankcase.
00:27:38And they were able to, it was a two-valve, just like the Apollo, because Taglioni didn't see the point of four valves.
00:27:52He'd had some truck with them.
00:27:54His 125 inline four had four valves, but it just seemed like too much complication to him.
00:28:04And why didn't the 125 inline four go anywhere?
00:28:10Because at the time that it was making 23 horsepower, Shorichiro Iremadri's 125.5 was making 32 horsepower at 20,000.
00:28:24And the following year, 34 horsepower at 20,500.
00:28:29So it was a different league.
00:28:31Ducati was not yet an industrial manufacturer in 64.
00:28:38Honda was.
00:28:39Honda could produce these fabulous eruptions of successful technology because they could afford it.
00:28:47And because they were putting their name before everyone in the world as associated with high technology and racing success.
00:28:58So this new V4 didn't go anywhere either.
00:29:06I think it was, it was canceled in 82, but what lives on in a very big way is the 90 degree V4 self-balancing.
00:29:21Because if Yamaha does decide to, to drop their inline four in favor of the V4 that they are testing, every constructor in MotoGP will be building engines of the same architecture as Taglioni's Apollo.
00:29:41And, of course, they, in world super bike use, they found that they had 48% on the front wheel, 52% of the weight on the rear wheel.
00:29:55And the things pushed like crazy and they showed signs of instability.
00:30:00And so there, every year there was a new frame, a new way of trying to move the motor forward.
00:30:06The radiators got slotted, so the cylinder head came forward.
00:30:11They made the exhaust valves shorter than the intakes so that they could tilt the valve cover to keep it away from the front tire as the suspension was compressed.
00:30:24And I remember seeing on those race bikes, rubber from the front tire on the front cylinder's valve cover.
00:30:33So that's pushing it.
00:30:35Yeah, it is pushing it.
00:30:37Well, the twins at the very end, the Ducati V twins, had tremendous bores.
00:30:42You know, one, whatever they, what were they, one?
00:30:45112, maybe 116.
00:30:47112.
00:30:48They were bigger, bigger than a big block Chevy.
00:30:52So, you know, they're going for displacement with keeping the engine short, which of course was one of the reasons that the Apollo had an 84.5 bore and a 56 millimeter stroke was to keep, keep the height of the engine low.
00:31:09So the Panigale, the current Panigale, such as this one parked behind me, is 81.0 by 53.5.
00:31:18So it's, you know, two and a half, within two and a half millimeters of the stroke value of that guy.
00:31:25Yeah.
00:31:25It's pretty great.
00:31:27Of course, that one's, they rate that one at 208 at the rear wheel.
00:31:31And I think the final story we did on the Apollo a number of years ago says the final milder cams, reduced compression, seven to one compression.
00:31:40They went to milder cams.
00:31:42It dropped power to 67 horsepower and top speed was about a hundred, only, only a hundred.
00:31:49And what it did was change the power to weight ratio to less than your average British twin of the time.
00:31:56Yeah.
00:31:57So it was a little bit ponderous, but, you know, so were Harleys.
00:32:01Yes.
00:32:02Yes.
00:32:03At the time.
00:32:04Franco Fanet, who spent his life at Ducati, said,
00:32:10that it handled like a truck.
00:32:12And I remember Yvonne Duhamel saying of the long swing arm Kawasaki, he said,
00:32:20it handled like a limber wagon.
00:32:24And so, you know, riders, unless they've been properly instructed by persons of higher pay grade,
00:32:34will speak the truth.
00:32:37Yeah.
00:32:38I don't have the dimensions of the engine, but, you know, looking at the photography of it, we'll do our high, high tech graphics here.
00:32:44But the engine is, there's a cylinder way up here by the front fender.
00:32:48And then it just keeps, it just keeps on going.
00:32:52And it's just real, real long.
00:32:55And then you have that nice short swing arm.
00:32:56And, you know, when you think about Yamaha R1 of 1998, they stacked the gearbox shafts so that they would be vertical.
00:33:04And I believe that swing arm, they were very proud to say it was 22 point something inches.
00:33:10Yep.
00:33:10And they were allowed then shortening the engine.
00:33:13They put more of the weight forward and then they were able to extend the swing arm.
00:33:17Yamaha started stacking the gearbox shafts in its 500 two-stroke GP bikes in 84.
00:33:25The Guzzi V8 and all of the Guzzi horizontal singles have their gearbox shafts vertically stacked because of this length problem.
00:33:37Anytime you do a V engine, it's like you're pushing the front and the rear wheels farther apart.
00:33:44But the criterion of wanting quick turn-in and rapid steering wants to bring them back together.
00:33:55Well, that was one of the V angle of 45 for the XR750 was actually one of its advantages because you could move that engine around more than a 90, which, you know, clink, clink, clink.
00:34:06And during all the, circa 2000, Dirt Track was experimenting with super trackers.
00:34:13So they were trying to get, you know, just regular old off-the-shelf Honda because Honda was doing super hawks and there was TL-1000 Suzuki's and et cetera, on and on.
00:34:24And so all those guys were trying flat trackers.
00:34:28And, of course, somebody showed up with the Ducati-powered machine and apparently the rear weight bias was a little much for that particular bike.
00:34:36Well, that was a problem for the bevel drive because with the engine as far back as it was, the heavy part of the engine being the crankshaft and crankcase with the gearbox on the back of it,
00:34:50they ended up with quite insufficient weight on the front.
00:34:57And so they had to recover stability by giving it a 30 or 31 degree steering head angle and four and a half inches of trail.
00:35:06And that's where Cook Nelson got that phrase about cornering as if it's on rails because you didn't really have an option.
00:35:17Once you'd set that thing into a corner and on an arc, best leave it there and travel around the arc and exit onto the straightaway.
00:35:29Whereas when he rode, he went to Japan to ride the RG500 race GP bike, he said it was like, and horsemen and women say this too about the best horses.
00:35:47I, it went where I looked and lots of horses can jump a course with the rider as passenger.
00:35:58As soon as they know what the sequence of jumps is, they just, it's, they can do it.
00:36:03There's two brains and one goal, which is to get back to the barn and eat.
00:36:10Anyway, one of the other problems that had to be dealt with was in the 1930s, early 30s,
00:36:20AJS decided to make an air-cooled V4 as a hypo production bike was 500 CCs, which was considered fairly good size displacement in those days.
00:36:33And they found that when they tried to tune it up into a racer, that the hot air streaming back from the front cylinders,
00:36:43I think this had a 55 degree V angle, overheated the rear cylinders because they're supposed to be cooled, not heated.
00:36:51They're getting hot air off the front cylinders.
00:36:54So they had to reduce the compression ratio on the rear cylinders to 5.5 to one to stop it detonating.
00:37:03Sounds like the Iron Harley at Daytona in 1970.
00:37:07The one that Dick O'Brien said, you'd switch the lights off in the dyno room after a run.
00:37:15You could see where the cylinder heads were.
00:37:19So they finally water-cooled that bike.
00:37:23It was really ambitious, complex program.
00:37:29And they eventually came close to being, making a winner of it.
00:37:34It was very powerful.
00:37:35But no trying to cool the rear cylinder with hot air off the front cylinder, which is another reason for the 90 degree V angle.
00:37:46The cylinders in the rear had cylindrical fins.
00:37:49So air from coming over the top of the tire into the space above the front cylinder could pass through those fins.
00:38:01The front cylinder, which was nearly horizontal, had axial fins, fins that were parallel to the cylinder axis, just as Moto Guzzi's always had.
00:38:13Yeah, we grabbed a technical drawing for one of our stories.
00:38:17There's, again, high-tech graphics here, but it shows the fin spacing as, I believe, 9 millimeters.
00:38:24So, you know.
00:38:25Yeah.
00:38:29So that was a problem avoided because Taglioni knew his history.
00:38:37He knew what people had tried, what had worked, what had not worked.
00:38:41People in the design business talk endlessly with others of the same inclination when the occasion arises.
00:38:53It's a, accumulating that knowledge has been a wonderful feature of the development of the motorcycle.
00:39:01So, at one point, Massimo Bordi writes a thesis, engineering thesis, in which he proposes joining Taglioni's developed desmodromic valve train
00:39:21with Keith Duckworth's narrow angle four-valve flat, fast-burn combustion chamber to make something
00:39:30is, what's that word, synergistic.
00:39:40Each part benefiting from the other so that they are bootstrapped to a new level.
00:39:45Yeah, the Cosworth, I mean, Cosworth combustion chamber and four valves and tumble and all that stuff is, we're living on that today.
00:39:56Because practically every motorcycle, car, and light truck engine uses Keith Duckworth's, a Keith Duckworth-inspired combustion chamber.
00:40:05Because not only does it work for racing, it can produce good results for emissions compliance.
00:40:12Now, that's not a bad combination right there.
00:40:15Some flexibility.
00:40:18So, Bordi went to Cosworth and spent time there talking with engineers and learning all about it, what they were willing to tell him.
00:40:29And he was hired at Ducati and he showed both ambition and guile, we're told.
00:40:38And he encountered the anger of Dr. Taglioni, who saw Bordi as a rug merchant bringing false gods hoping for worshippers to arise at Ducati.
00:40:58And there's a story told that one day the Bordi folk who were building the Otto Valvole, the eight-valve, liquid-cooled, 90-degree V-twin, were out testing.
00:41:13And as evening drew on, they returned to the workshop to leave the motorcycles there and go to their well-deserved dinners, only to find that the workshop was occupied by Taglioni sympathizers who would not let them in.
00:41:29And this is great because the notion of a fight breaking out at Honda or one of these well-organized corporations is, well, not very likely.
00:41:47But these are the Mediterranean shores and there was supposedly a punch-out followed by a certain embarrassment and a return to cordiality.
00:42:01At one point when the liquid-cooled eight-valve was needing dynamometer access, they sent Taglioni on a sales trip to Russia.
00:42:13And so it's unfortunate that these enmities developed, but Taglioni, the things he knew, he had learned by the most practical means.
00:42:29Therefore, he had good reason to believe them.
00:42:32One point of overlap is that looking at the downdraft angle of the Cosworth-inspired liquid-cooled Ducati, he decided to try it on one of his V-twins and found that it was an improvement over the classic cross-flow system,
00:42:59where here's the valve stem, where here's the valve stem, the valve head is here, and the port just comes up to it and goes.
00:43:05And the late Kenny Augustine told me more than once, he said, I can get more air through a cross-flow setup than most people can get through a downdraft.
00:43:19So, okay, there's a lot of ways to accomplish the same goal.
00:43:28In this case, Ducati powers that were at the Milan show one year were looking at what was on show and trying to forecast what the future might be.
00:43:45And they decided the future was liquid-cooled with four valves per cylinder.
00:43:53And at that point, the B-Panta, the four-cylinder Panta V4 was being canceled.
00:44:06Taglioni was retiring.
00:44:08And he, of course, didn't go far.
00:44:13He was always there for the faithful to consult.
00:44:17But it was an eight-valve future from that point.
00:44:22And I think you saying this reminds me, of course, that the bridge between the eras was the great Gigi Mengele.
00:44:31So, Mengele did a lot of the drawing for Dr. T.
00:44:36I mean, Dr. Taglioni, of course, great designer.
00:44:40But Mengele was really credited, quietly credited with a lot of the hard work.
00:44:48Making the desmodromic valve system work on the four-valve was actually, I believe, a Mengele project.
00:44:55And it was complicated.
00:44:57And my friend Ed, who works on these things still to this day, says setting clearances on a four-valve of the era is a real, the desmo valve clearances is a real headache.
00:45:11I went to the service school for the D-16, the production bike that was a racer replica.
00:45:21And, of course, they have a special plier by which the essentially press-fitted collets that fit into the groove on the valve stem.
00:45:33And then their taper fits into the, I can't call it the spring retainer, the action platform.
00:45:45You take hold of that assembly and crunch, it goes home solidly.
00:45:52Whereas, if you were assembling it without those pliers and you sort of tapped on it and so on, I think it's mostly there, and assembled the engine and clearanced it for that, after it had run for a minute or so and those valves had been knocked back and forth, clearance would appear, noise would be heard, and you would think, oh, I have to do it all over again.
00:46:18So, hence the pliers.
00:46:23So, I think that it's not surprising that some recent Ducati products have valve springs again, because, of course, valve springs have come a long way since the 1950s.
00:46:36Oh, 100% makes sense.
00:46:37You know, I mean, we can all love the religion of desmo and, oh, it's essential to the character of the brand.
00:46:43But, you know, Ducati is really a, I think, essential to Ducati's brand is high performance.
00:46:51So, we had high performance desmo singles, and then when it came time to make a twin, Ducati suddenly became a twin company.
00:46:58Yep.
00:46:58And when it became time to make a V4, it's a V4 company.
00:47:02It makes perfect sense.
00:47:03And you want to throw a spring head at it?
00:47:05Why not?
00:47:07Yeah.
00:47:07I mean, honestly.
00:47:08So, the great Bruno Di Prato, our Italian contributor, he worked at Ducati.
00:47:14He brought Ducati the super blend bearings when they were having problems with their bottom end back in the roller days, you know, circa 72.
00:47:23Dr. Taglioni was the best man at his wedding.
00:47:27Yes, that's right.
00:47:28So, you know, they were friends.
00:47:29They were friends.
00:47:29And we had him do a story on the Apollo, a short story for the print magazine a number of years ago.
00:47:36And he said, the engine was virtually vibration-free.
00:47:40Dr. T once told me about the day the bike was unveiled to U.S. dealers, and one of them mentioned vibration.
00:47:45In response, Fabio reached in for the change in his pocket, extracted an American quarter, and laid it on the tank.
00:47:52He proceeded to whack the throttle open, and the quarter did not move.
00:47:56Yes.
00:47:57That's pretty good.
00:47:58And then, what we were talking about, the handling issues, he said, road tests were conducted by the great Giancarlo Labrenti, one of the best Ducati technicians ever, who always reported high-speed stability problems.
00:48:12Yes.
00:48:12By his own admission, Taglioni was a supreme motorist, but not a chassis specialist.
00:48:18So, power and torque were astonishing, but short swing arms and 5-inch sections, 16-inch wheels.
00:48:25600 pounds.
00:48:26600 pounds.
00:48:27It led to some entertainment value.
00:48:35But this is how a tradition is formed.
00:48:40And I think that it would be foolish to imagine that a two-valve Desmo arrangement should carry forward through time, because that is not – that's producing a vintage machine.
00:48:59And it's then going to become a veteran machine.
00:49:02And eventually, it will be completely forgotten.
00:49:07At one point, the decision was made by Claudio Domenicali that Ducati would compete with the manufacturers of big, powerful sport bikes, head-to-head, with no reliance on, ah, but it has European flair.
00:49:30No, no, we have the horsepower.
00:49:34Oh, the 1098.
00:49:35Yeah, the 1098 was really the, you know, the stick in the sand there.
00:49:42The 1098 came along, and they geared it for the quarter mile.
00:49:48It was, I think, the first 10-second Ducati we ran.
00:49:52And, yeah, they were just going like, you know what?
00:49:55Because, you know, prior to that, in talking to – oh, shoot.
00:50:00I mentioned this guy quite a bit.
00:50:02Anyway, the test rider that I was dealing with, sort of circuit, you know, mid-2000s, he said that every Ducati we gear for top speed.
00:50:13That's what we do.
00:50:15And that was a philosophical change for the company.
00:50:17The 1098 really was a huge change for the company, because it ended the Turblanche era, which had, you know, ended with a shouting match with Claudio and Turblanche, Pierre Turblanche.
00:50:28He was upstairs, you know, in his office, and things got to change, and I don't want to change.
00:50:33Or whatever happened there, it was the end of the era.
00:50:37And then the fellow at Grosbeak, who's at BMW now, who just did R12G slash S and that whole platform and those models, he was part of that design team.
00:50:47Great guy.
00:50:48But he was at Ducati at the time, and I was able to talk to him about the 1098.
00:50:52And I said, oh, it's a perfectly, the 1098 was a perfectly conservative, cozy blanket.
00:50:59You know, it was an apology to the Ducatisti for the 999, you know, the 999.
00:51:05Looking back at it now, I mean, even at the time, I could, you know, cerebrally, I could understand, like, yeah, this all makes sense.
00:51:15But that wasn't really why we were necessarily in the Ducati camp.
00:51:22It didn't make sense.
00:51:22I mean, a 916 made no sense.
00:51:24It was rock hard.
00:51:25Everything was rock hard.
00:51:27The clutch was rock hard.
00:51:28The seat was rock hard.
00:51:30The mufflers were under the tail section.
00:51:33And riding one of those, you know, the riding position was pretty brutal.
00:51:36The pegs were very high.
00:51:37Anyway, riding it on the street was, it could be fun, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't easy.
00:51:45But, man, you get on a 748 or a 916 and you went to a racetrack, and for 20 laps, it was pure bliss.
00:51:52It totally did, absolutely made perfect sense.
00:51:54But it was sensual and experiential, not necessarily cerebral.
00:52:00And I think there was a lot of cerebrality around the triple mine.
00:52:04And the 1098 was the bike that said, we're going to publish real weights, we're going to publish real horsepower outputs, and we're going to nail a quarter mile.
00:52:15We're going to compete head-to-head with the Japanese.
00:52:18And that was no doubt, that has to come from the top.
00:52:23It has to come from the top.
00:52:25It's like, I talked to a Harley executive years ago, and I said, why, why do these bikes have to be so heavy?
00:52:36Why does a Harley Big Twin have to weigh as much as it does?
00:52:40Can we not make a die-cast aluminum part that's stronger, lighter, uses less material, is easier to ship?
00:52:48He's like, yeah, absolutely.
00:52:49And he went to his snowmobile, and he grabbed this beautiful cast part that was to hold the handlebars, I think.
00:52:56And then he showed me the previous steel part.
00:52:58And he's like, this is cheaper, it's lighter, it's more rigid, everything is better.
00:53:04Yes.
00:53:05And I said, yes.
00:53:06And he said, yeah.
00:53:07I said, why doesn't the weight conversation come in the room?
00:53:10And he said, it hasn't been a priority, and it has to come from the top.
00:53:14Yeah.
00:53:15And that's it.
00:53:16And Claudio made it come from the top.
00:53:18And I think the respect I have for Claudio Nomenicali is, came in as an engineer, has a practical mindset, and.
00:53:30He's been good at whatever job they gave him.
00:53:33Yeah.
00:53:33And as much work as it, I mean, I am sure that when he got made CEO, you know, when you're an engineer, even if you're a really talented leader, you're still an engineer.
00:53:45You know, it's like being a writer.
00:53:46Like, why do you like to write?
00:53:48Well, I like to sit in a moderately lit room by myself, stare out the window, and think of things to say.
00:53:54You know, we're not negotiating contracts.
00:53:59We're just trying to tell a damn good story.
00:54:01And, you know, an engineer wants to sit in, and it's, it's like, doctor, it's like Bordy wanting to say, I want, I want a DFE head, four valve head on top of the speed twin.
00:54:11Let's go.
00:54:12Two progressive concepts unified into one.
00:54:17And so, for Claudio, it's great because he has a, I think the leadership of a company has to have that molecular or DNA connection.
00:54:35It has to go to the soul of the company, which for Ducati would be great engineering and figuring out what those essential truths are, because they have found the essential truths.
00:54:45If you look at MotoGP, I mean, okay, Mark Marquez, I mean, have we ever seen a guy do this?
00:54:54I don't think so.
00:54:56You know.
00:54:56Such is uncrashing.
00:54:58Yeah, but he has the tool to get it done, and Ducati is the tool to get it done, and it's because they have discovered and unrelentingly focused on the essential truths that make a motorcycle work within the confines of whatever.
00:55:17If the telescopic fork is somehow a weakness, well, we've, we've pounded the weakness into submission, and we're using its strengths to make it work better than anything else could possibly work as a front suspension, because it's not a perfect way to.
00:55:33No, it's filled with compromise.
00:55:35It's filled with compromise, and yet here we are.
00:55:38Yes, and many alternatives have been tried.
00:55:41It was interesting to talk to Pierre at Terre Blanche at the Milan show one year about the 999.
00:55:54I think this was probably around the time of its introduction, and the way he described the work was he said,
00:56:03this motorcycle has been accumulating changes since its inception, and a major piece, part of the work that I've done here is that when three or four bolted together pieces are supporting a rectifier, an ignition box, what have you,
00:56:25I've found a way to make a single part do all those jobs.
00:56:30I've tried to rationalize it.
00:56:32I've tried to route things in a way that makes sense for assembly in this and that, and of course, I don't think Peter had much truck with single-sided suspension.
00:56:43I remember Gary Mathers, for so many years, American Honda's racing manager, saying,
00:56:50if you want to see the results of stress asymmetry, go to turn eight at Willow, or whatever turn it was, because if the swing arm is supporting the wheel from one side,
00:57:07any slightest flexibility is going to result in self-steering, and I don't think Peter wanted any truck with that.
00:57:15But Ducati buyers wanted it.
00:57:20They thought 916 just looks great to them.
00:57:25Yeah, especially at that time, you know, VFRs and RC30s, you just thought, oh, this is the coolest thing.
00:57:32It's like this big.
00:57:33And such a simple shape.
00:57:36Yeah.
00:57:36A lovely simple shape.
00:57:37Like, I loved it.
00:57:39I had a 95.
00:57:40It was the first new motorcycle I ever bought.
00:57:42It was a 1995 Honda VFR 750.
00:57:45And it was, you know, I mean, you had to take the exhaust pipe off, but it was two bolts, and the silencer comes off, and then it was four lug nuts.
00:57:52You don't have to disturb the chain.
00:57:55You know, wheel just comes off.
00:57:56You do your tire change and move on.
00:57:58But Ter Blanche, at the time, said, we talked about the double-sided swingarm and the 999, and he said, as you were pointing out, he was pressing toward the rational, and they tested the 999 with a single-sided swingarm and the dual arm that it ended up with, and they got faster lap times with the dual arm.
00:58:21Yep.
00:58:21And so everyone insisted, or he insisted, that it has the dual arm because it's faster, and, you know, you can get that through.
00:58:27But that 1098 came out, and what did it have?
00:58:30Single-sided swingarm.
00:58:31Marketing said, hey, make that work, okay?
00:58:36And that was part of just saying, hey, we're, you know, we're back.
00:58:40We're going to.
00:58:41Well, as soon as MiG-21 and SR-71 had that intake cone in front of each engine, oh, got to have, that is the greatest shock cone.
00:58:57And I think on the SR, it moves 26 inches or something from one extreme to the other.
00:59:04The aim being to hold the shock in such a position that it decelerates incoming air to subsonic because it's a sonic engine in there, a subsonic combustion system.
00:59:17So, but our sense of things is not the same as a design optima.
00:59:29And so there is definitely room for art because the person who designed the 916 made it look the way it does was an artist, and no question about it, as well as an engineer.
00:59:51And I think I've said this before, it's possible to be suspicious of art in products, devices that have to perform a certain task.
01:00:05I don't like swept wings.
01:00:07Well, if you want to go this fast, I've got it, F-104.
01:00:10Oh, the problem being that it's hard to find an engineer who has that sense of how things will look to people and can build that into the functioning of the device, which is intended to move performance forward.
01:00:34And I think that the firearms of John Browning show this same sense of the rightness of things in their design.
01:00:50Oh, Cesar Garini, Italian shotguns?
01:00:53Oh, my God.
01:00:54Yeah, I went to a gun store, and I looked at modern automatic pistols.
01:01:00To me, they look like staplers.
01:01:03They do, yeah.
01:01:04They have big crude trigger guards with the room for a person wearing arctic mittens to put all his fingers through there.
01:01:16And the thing just has a club-like look compared with 1911, which, with all its faults, is still much sought after by people who fancy that sort of thing.
01:01:29Because it's a timeless design.
01:01:31Because it's a timeless design, occasionally it'll catch one of the empties in the ejection port.
01:01:43And that means it's obsolete because there are later designs that don't do that, that don't stovepipe.
01:01:58But I think this ability to combine human sensibility with engineering flourishes in Italy to a wonderful degree.
01:02:15I've always been impressed with that when I was, as I said, still languishing in higher education.
01:02:25And I saw that 250 single, Ducati, and I thought, oh, why don't I have the sense to quit this, get a job, and get one of those motorbikes?
01:02:40Yeah.
01:02:40Well, I mean, 1994, Massimo Tamburini and Ducati unleashed the 916 upon the world, and everything else looked clunky.
01:02:52Yep, clunky.
01:02:54Can't be helped.
01:02:55Oh, it was essential.
01:02:56Well, that's the Ducati Apollo, folks.
01:02:59We did extend our topical discussion outside of that, but always linked back to Ducati.
01:03:05Okay, so Ducati's V4 happened long, long ago, and we appreciate the new one.
01:03:13Oh, my gosh, you can't even, this is like time travel.
01:03:18It's supernatural, supernatural horsepower.
01:03:22That and the M1000RR, completely different proposition than other leader bikes that have come before in standard form.
01:03:29They're just, it's mind-boggling how much grip, how they turn, the forces on the brakes, the forces in cornering, the forces on acceleration.
01:03:43And the achievement of, the achievement of ultimates raises all boats, so to speak.
01:03:50It's a, it's a knockout.
01:03:53Well, what, you know, I, I know you said this earlier, oh, what could have been?
01:03:57Yes.
01:03:57But imagine, imagine that, imagine the V4 pushrod Ducati.
01:04:02What if Ducati became a cruiser company?
01:04:09Now a movie in theaters this summer.
01:04:12Yep.
01:04:13The original Diablo, folks, that's what it was.
01:04:15Yes, right.
01:04:16So, well, thanks, thanks for listening.
01:04:19Catch us next time.
01:04:20Let's get down in the comments.
01:04:22If you're digging the podcast, share it with your friends.
01:04:26Help us out with that.
01:04:27And yeah, jump in the comments.
01:04:29We love reading them.
01:04:30I'm always in there.
01:04:33And we'll catch you next time.
01:04:34Thanks for listening.
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