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Every superbike and MotoGP bike Ducati has made in the last 50-plus years owes it all to the company's first successful V-twin racer: The 1972 Imola 750. The Imola 200-mile race was the coming out party for Ducati's 750 Imola racebike, designed and led by the great engineer Fabio Taglioni. It was the motorcycle Ducati needed to stay in business, and the win showed it was exactly the right bike at precisely the right time, all the way down to its bevel-driven overhead-cam desmodromic valve system. It's a story of financial woes, drama, and an unlikely success that set Ducati on a path it maintains today. Join Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer as they talk about the Imola 750 and Hoyer's chance to see one of the original eight bikes in person with Mecum Auctions as that example gets prepared for the Monterey Car Week Auction August 13-15.
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Every superbike and MotoGP bike Ducati has made in the last 50-plus years owes it all to the company's first successful V-twin racer: The 1972 Imola 750. The Imola 200-mile race was the coming out party for Ducati's 750 Imola racebike, designed and led by the great engineer Fabio Taglioni. It was the motorcycle Ducati needed to stay in business, and the win showed it was exactly the right bike at precisely the right time, all the way down to its bevel-driven overhead-cam desmodromic valve system. It's a story of financial woes, drama, and an unlikely success that set Ducati on a path it maintains today. Join Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer as they talk about the Imola 750 and Hoyer's chance to see one of the original eight bikes in person with Mecum Auctions as that example gets prepared for the Monterey Car Week Auction August 13-15.
Find us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/cw/CycleWorldPodcast
Become a Channel Partner: https://octanemedia.co/home/become-an-advertiser/
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
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SportsTranscript
00:00:00Hey, welcome to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer, the Editor-in-Chief, and I'm with Kevin Cameron. He's
00:00:05our Technical Editor.
00:00:08I could say, what's up, guys? Welcome back to the channel, but I won't.
00:00:14Yes, I shall pass over the fact that.
00:00:19We're glad you're here. This week's topic is super interesting, I think, certainly for me and Kevin, and we hope
00:00:28for you, too.
00:00:28Kevin was at the 1972 Imola 200, where Ducati brought its first racing, well, let's say successful racing B-Twin.
00:00:38They had some bikes before that that were twins, but this is the one that they showed up with, the
00:00:43Imola 200, the Daytona of Europe, as they call it.
00:00:48And everything seemed to go pretty good for them, and then suddenly Ducati was a builder, a world-class superbike
00:00:55B-Twin 750s.
00:00:56They were in an era of an explosion of big bike sales.
00:01:03You know, Honda's CB750 had changed the market, and, you know, they had crept up in displacement.
00:01:10They had 450 singles that would vibrate across the floor on their center stands.
00:01:15Lots going on.
00:01:16But the Imola 200 really saved – we often refer to it in our conversations here as the week that
00:01:22saved Ducati or the day that saved Ducati.
00:01:27Ducati's been on the brink of financial disaster many times in its history, and circa 70, it was kind of
00:01:34in that things were not going great,
00:01:36and they were really needing a Hail Mary and something to define their future.
00:01:43And didn't they get it, Kevin?
00:01:44I mean, it really –
00:01:45It was a fabulous thing for them because if it had been a year later, they couldn't have done it
00:01:53because the rules changed to allow the 350 Yamahas that were blitzing Daytona.
00:01:59In 72, it was Don Emdy, and in 73, it would be Yarno Saarinen, who won the 73 Imola 200.
00:02:09So, it was like the Battle of Midway, which for the American side was just a fabulous conjunction of things
00:02:26without which nothing could have happened successfully.
00:02:30And yet, all those factors were there, and they functioned.
00:02:36And the two Ducati's were running out of fuel at the end.
00:02:41They were – the riders were having to try to slosh fuel over to the Pepcox, and they're sputtering and
00:02:50banging,
00:02:50and you're thinking they're going to stop at any moment, but they didn't.
00:02:54They kept going.
00:02:55Yeah, Bruno Cagliari.
00:02:57Yeah, Paul Smart.
00:02:58I love how Paul Smart got the job.
00:03:00We'll get to that, but Paul Smart won.
00:03:02I think he had maybe a little more fuel, or he was more proactive.
00:03:05Or he was planning a last lapper.
00:03:08Yeah.
00:03:09He could have been because Spagliari was an older man at the time, whereas Paul was an active racer.
00:03:19And active racers always have a last lap plan if they're close to somebody.
00:03:24Some place they think he's weak and they're strong.
00:03:28Some place where his bike doesn't work as well as it might be, where the track will spring, snap, and
00:03:37you're suddenly second.
00:03:38Well, Bruno Spagliari was said to be running on one cylinder.
00:03:43He was still running.
00:03:44He got second place.
00:03:45Yeah.
00:03:47And the lore is they were doing well.
00:03:51They showed up and they were getting good lap times right from the beginning.
00:03:57And they were told not to race each other until the last five laps.
00:04:03Good luck with that.
00:04:05Yeah.
00:04:06Don't race, racers.
00:04:08It's something that every racer knows, that if there are two bikes leading and they start carving one another up,
00:04:17it slows them down.
00:04:18Look out for the person in third place.
00:04:21What if it's Ai Okura, who goes so well at the end, you know?
00:04:28And this is the kind of thing that racers have well in mind throughout the race.
00:04:34They've got all this stuff listed for their own happiness and preservation of wealth.
00:04:43So I wouldn't be at all surprised if Paul had a last lap plan because riders tend to do that.
00:04:53So, it was a wonderful day.
00:04:57The night before, my rider, Cliff Carr, and Paul Smart were standing in front of Ducati's glass van.
00:05:06And it must have been quite late because it was actually dark.
00:05:10This is April.
00:05:13And Paul had just arrived and sort of, you know, seemed slightly out of breath.
00:05:19And he'd just come from a familiarization meeting.
00:05:24And he's saying, the RPM they're telling me to shift at, is it even possible?
00:05:30And it's safe to some other tremendous number.
00:05:34And, of course, Smart was accustomed to things like the Triumph Trident.
00:05:41Triumph told Dick Mann, this is an 8200 RPM engine.
00:05:45And Dick Mann privately said to himself, feels more like a 7800 RPM engine to me.
00:05:53And so, people who grew up racing Max's, you know, the 7200 was it.
00:06:01So, this aspect of the Ducati was something unfamiliar to all these people.
00:06:09And it was entirely intentional because after all the frou-frou of trying to make bigger motorcycles
00:06:16to satisfy the growing market, which the following year was going to be bombed out by Z1
00:06:24and then by Suzuki GSs, it was a time when everyone knew there was big money to be made in
00:06:37big bikes.
00:06:38Who was going to get it?
00:06:43And the problem had been vibration.
00:06:45And, of course, for a British twin, vibration, the bigger they made the pistons, the more it shook.
00:06:52And the bigger the balance factor they had to use.
00:06:56And there were strict limits on RPM.
00:06:58Plus, it was a pushrod engine, which has special problems.
00:07:02It has all valves are operated by springs.
00:07:05That is, the mechanism is springy.
00:07:08The cams are springy.
00:07:10If you have rocker arms, they're springy.
00:07:16But what was wonderful was that Taglioni used wisdom to make his choices.
00:07:24First of all, he got rid of the vibration by going with the 90-degree angle, the V angle.
00:07:31This is the famous Dr. T.
00:07:33We have to rewind, and we just assume Taglioni.
00:07:36Everyone knows Taglioni.
00:07:38Fabio Taglioni.
00:07:39Yes.
00:07:40He introduced Desmo, what, on the 125 in the 50s.
00:07:44And he was a fan of Desmo.
00:07:46And he was solving a problem because valve springs were horrible.
00:07:49They were.
00:07:50And he didn't want to have valve spring problems.
00:07:52And he was like, hey, this is clever.
00:07:54And they stuck with it.
00:07:56And they did make spring heads.
00:07:57You know, they had 350 singles with spring heads and stuff.
00:08:01But it was always there at Ducati.
00:08:03And Dr. T was a purveyor of Desmodromic.
00:08:06He had made the Trecami, the 3-cam, 125.
00:08:14And they had embarrassed the big companies in Italy with the ability of this single to just
00:08:24rev to RPM that no one else could reach at the time, not if they wanted to finish.
00:08:30And so it is frequently said that he took the 90-degree cylinder angle from the Apollo
00:08:40police bike.
00:08:42But the fact is that everyone had known for decades that a 90-degree V-twin, if counterweighted
00:08:52to 100% of one cylinder's reciprocating weight, resulted in basically zero primary shaking
00:09:01force.
00:09:02Primary means once per crankshaft revolution.
00:09:05There were secondary vibrations, one quarter of the amplitude.
00:09:12So it can be neglected in many cases.
00:09:18So in that choice, he had defeated all of the motorcycles that were behind them at the end at
00:09:28Imola, because none of them could reach the RPM that the Imola bike could, because most of its
00:09:41vibration had been made self-canceling.
00:09:46Now, the Triumph triple had a decent primary balance, but it had a tremendous rowboat shaking.
00:09:56And as previously noted, was it a 7,800 RPM engine or an 8,200 RPM engine?
00:10:06Yeah, pausing for a moment, one of the reasons we're doing the podcast on the Imola 200 is
00:10:13that I recently got time with Mecham Auctions to see one of the original eight bikes.
00:10:19We have photographs in the archive from the factory of the eight 750 Imolas, and I got to
00:10:24see some of the characteristics of the motorcycle.
00:10:27And why that's important at this moment, Kevin, is because I got to look at the tachometer
00:10:34originally, and originally a Velia tach marked with a red line.
00:10:41So it had a tick on the tach face at about 9,300.
00:10:47So it had like a piece of tape at 9,300, but then it had a red dot at 95,
00:10:5497.
00:10:55It was kind of a big red dot.
00:10:57So it covered some RPM, but yeah, it was revving to, you know, close to 10,000 RPM, and Smarty
00:11:05was just absolutely gobsmacked.
00:11:08And by the way, it didn't shake, you know, like Norton Commandos, you know, parallel, any
00:11:12of those parallel twins.
00:11:13Holy moly.
00:11:15Like without rubber mounting, you can't even see when you rev that stuff up.
00:11:20And it's nuts.
00:11:24Basically, what it was, was a new era in RPM, unattainable by the previous motorcycles.
00:11:31You could argue that Butler and Smith managed to get the flat twin, their small one, to rev
00:11:38to 10,000.
00:11:41Where were they?
00:11:42They weren't at this race.
00:11:43So, and it took, it took them time to achieve that.
00:11:48Well, really, 1970 was a big, a big turning point for, for this whole industry.
00:11:59So, one of the points that you made, sorry, but one of the points that you made, you said,
00:12:03well, you know, where was being, you know, where was Butler and Smith?
00:12:05They weren't at this race.
00:12:07Where were the Yamaha twins?
00:12:08And as you said, in our, our conversations leading up to this podcast, with some foresight,
00:12:14they, they eliminated bikes with displacements less than 500 cc's, just to make sure that
00:12:20it wasn't a walkover, right?
00:12:23So, but maybe it was intentional, but they'd been to Daytona.
00:12:26They looked at Daytona and they saw what happened with the little two-stroke.
00:12:29And so they made this Formula 750 race truly.
00:12:34Dr. Taglioni went to Daytona in March.
00:12:38To look at what was going on and talk to people.
00:12:41So anyway, okay, we've got more RPM than the opposition.
00:12:45Now the question is, can we fill the cylinders at that speed?
00:12:51And this had been a problem that they'd worked on for years and years and years with the singles.
00:12:57Because the Imola twin was conceptually a pair of their Desmo 350 cylinders, plus a little fluff up with the
00:13:09boring bar on a common crankcase,
00:13:13actually on a common crank pin, connecting rods were side by side.
00:13:18Not Harley and Rolls-Royce Merlin style fork and blade.
00:13:25So they already had worked on the problem of filling the Desmo 350 cylinder.
00:13:32They had a good idea of what kind of cam profiles would be required.
00:13:36And the cam profile for the Imola lifted the 42-millimeter intake and what was it, 38-millimeter exhaust to
00:13:48an astonishing percentage of valve head area,
00:13:51over 30%, which in terms of, I call that specific lift when I'm thinking about it myself, but it basically
00:14:01relates the lift to the valve head.
00:14:03And in the ancient times, I won't mention when they were, but 17% of valve head diameter was the
00:14:14thing.
00:14:15And by the 1920s, early 30s, 25%.
00:14:20So it went like that.
00:14:23So to have 13 millimeters lift was an adventure.
00:14:27That was big stuff.
00:14:28And the cams that were used had vast amount of overlap.
00:14:35And the exhaust cam opened very early so that it was not that far from a Manx in that sense.
00:14:48So, and then 40-millimeter special Del Ordo's.
00:14:59And these heads were welded, the ports were reshaped, and they were shined up.
00:15:11And so they had a pretty good idea of what kind of poke they could expect.
00:15:18And they didn't expect anyone else to bring that amount.
00:15:23Plus the fact there was the racetrack right up the road.
00:15:30And you'll also see in descriptions of this motor that had sandcast cases.
00:15:36There's a good reason to use sandcast.
00:15:39Honda, for years, has used sandcast cases in MotoGP because, one, they can be heat-treated.
00:15:48Old-style die-casting, when you try to heat-treat it or try to weld it, the gas dissolved in
00:15:55it causes it to
00:15:57look like a stressor's delight sandwich.
00:16:00It just comes up in layers.
00:16:02It exfoliates.
00:16:04So, a sandcast crankcase, Ducati still uses sandcast crankcases for special projects.
00:16:14And so there are real advantages to this.
00:16:21Well, that was just one of the quick asides.
00:16:25I was at Blackhawk Farms with Mecham, and they had a green frame 70 Supersport 1974, and
00:16:32then they had this Imola 200 bike.
00:16:35And the cases on the Imola 200 bike, clearly sandcast.
00:16:38No seams, just there it was.
00:16:41And you walk over to the production bike, which was die-cast, perfectly good for a production
00:16:45motorcycle.
00:16:46But you could see all the seams of the die on it.
00:16:49You know, you just could see the difference in it.
00:16:51Yes.
00:16:52It was neat.
00:16:54Sandcastings have a certain patina.
00:16:58They are, the casting has a lovely surface texture.
00:17:03I'm speaking now strictly out of artistic appreciation.
00:17:10But they're at casting, so nice to look at.
00:17:12It has an organic feel to it.
00:17:14It has a natural, I don't know, it does.
00:17:17It has a natural ambiance to it that a billet case does not.
00:17:21You know, like billets art, don't get me wrong.
00:17:23Watching machine tool, you know, tooling marks are a sharp tool that does machining that leaves
00:17:29no marks, no visible marks.
00:17:31That's, that is an art in itself.
00:17:34But yeah, sandcasting, you know, I just see, what I like about the foundry, Kevin, is that
00:17:40usually the guys in the foundry are at least as smart as the engineers designing what they
00:17:45want to have cast.
00:17:46Because they know what can be made.
00:17:48The guys in the foundry always fix stuff.
00:17:51Yeah.
00:17:52They fix stuff quietly.
00:17:54They just say, well, that's, no, no.
00:17:56And they just.
00:17:56But it looks very 1900 because here comes two guys.
00:18:00They've got a long rod between them with a circular opening in it in which the crucible
00:18:07containing liquid aluminum is being carried.
00:18:10And one of them has a T handle.
00:18:12And when they get to the, to the mold and they get lined up and they pour this stuff,
00:18:20it is like medieval.
00:18:22These are wizards.
00:18:24Yeah.
00:18:25I wonder what.
00:18:26In a dark room with brilliant illumination of their faces.
00:18:30A couple gallons, you know, a gallon, I don't know, probably several liters of liquid aluminum.
00:18:37I wonder what aluminum it was because I just found out today, after all these years of playing
00:18:42with Jaguars, I just found out today that the cylinder, the aluminum cylinder had introduced
00:18:47in 1948 on the Jaguar XK engine, introduced in 48, that was used in a production car until
00:18:531987, that was used in racing in the 60s successfully, continued to win, was made out of RR56.
00:19:04Yes.
00:19:04Or excuse me, RR50.
00:19:06It was Rolls-Royce 50 developed for pistons by Rolls-Royce in wartime.
00:19:13Or even before the war.
00:19:15Yeah, yeah.
00:19:15But they were always.
00:19:16There was a lot of development.
00:19:17Yeah, it was for the trophy, the Air Race.
00:19:19Yeah, the Schneider.
00:19:21Schneider Cup.
00:19:22Anyway.
00:19:24There's so much delightful stuff to think of.
00:19:27But back to the Imla bike.
00:19:32Let's see, what is it?
00:19:35Quite over square with great big valves at an 80 degree included angle, which is quite wide
00:19:46so the combustion chamber.
00:19:48So the combustion chamber was deep.
00:19:49And there was supposedly a 516 squish band around the outside, but the vertical clearance that
00:19:58they gave it was, and this is not dynamic.
00:20:01This is measured clearance because there's going to be rod stretch, was 0.9 to 1.0 millimeters, whereas what
00:20:12you would like in a dynamic sense is more like 0.7.
00:20:16So the connecting rods are alloy steel.
00:20:23So the connecting rods are alloy steel.
00:20:46The machining center at Ducati make connecting rods of this type.
00:20:52It took half an hour.
00:20:54So this is one of the pressures that was acting on Ducati at this time, because even though the Imla
00:21:04bike was tremendously successful in bringing a shower of attention and orders to the company,
00:21:12what they really needed was a motorcycle easier to produce, because with the shaft and bevels drive to the camshafts,
00:21:24requiring quite a lot of setup, you do the shim stack, you reassemble everything, you put a transfer die on,
00:21:35you rotate through, and you look at the pattern of contact between gear trees.
00:21:40Now, it looks like lunch is going to be late today, and you do it again, until you get it
00:21:47the way it's supposed to be.
00:21:49Don't want too much backlash.
00:21:51You have to allow somewhere, there's a sliding coupling in the tower shaft that allows the cylinder to expand with
00:22:01heat more than the rod, which is steel.
00:22:05And so here are these two beautiful rods, which take too long to make.
00:22:11And as we know, the strange set of non-Desmo heads made for their 500 GP twin had tooth belt
00:22:31drive, Pirelli belts.
00:22:34And at the time, belts were in their infancy.
00:22:41So there were some failures, and Dr. Taglioni was, don't mess with that nonsense.
00:22:48It's not ready for prime time.
00:22:51But when Mark and I talked with a Gates engineer, and this is quite recently, he said every little whip
00:23:03stitch, we'd come up with a modification to our process that resulted in stronger and stronger belts.
00:23:10Park number was there, you know, the pitch, the width, the total belt length, and so forth.
00:23:17But the belts were getting better and better.
00:23:21So that later, when Taglioni was free to address, after this racing surge was put an end to Spironi and
00:23:33Milvio were told to go elsewhere, we're not going to spend money on racing anymore.
00:23:40They were the guys kind of running, they were the guys running the company at the time.
00:23:43Yes, they were given the task of make something out of this company.
00:23:49And they thought, correctly, that racing might do it.
00:23:57Spruance launched all his planes at Midway.
00:24:01And they arrived over the Japanese carriers while they were changing their armament.
00:24:08And four of them were sunk.
00:24:10But if they'd arrived a little earlier or a little later, who knows?
00:24:16And this is the wonderful thing about this Imola thing, because certainly Taglioni acted wisely, whipping up a functional racer
00:24:31out of virtually nothing.
00:24:34It was like March 20th, 1970, that he first started putting some ideas on paper.
00:24:43And here we are, two years later, with this racer that had sufficient maturity to win at the first go.
00:24:54Not bad.
00:24:56Makes the old man look pretty good.
00:24:58It's possible, you know, to think of Taglioni, if you arrived on this scene during the Massimo Bordi era, the
00:25:06four-valve liquid-cooled auto-valvole.
00:25:13It's easy to think of Taglioni as the last of the dying breed, the representative of technology past, and so
00:25:23forth.
00:25:23Never mind that.
00:25:25The things that he did to create this motorcycle were clever.
00:25:29Here's an example.
00:25:31Did you want to say something?
00:25:33It perfectly matched a moment in time.
00:25:39There is genius in the bike.
00:25:41There is cleverness in it.
00:25:43He worked hard in the time he had allotted.
00:25:47And he used the ideas and resources at hand to make a thing that did the job in the perfect
00:25:54time to do the job.
00:25:56So it's wonderful.
00:25:58And just to point out, the 750 GT is what was out there.
00:26:03There was a springhead version, 750 GT.
00:26:05It had AMO carburetors.
00:26:07And it was a very nice street bike.
00:26:09I tested one in later years.
00:26:11And that was the basis or the foundation for the move to the AMO bikes.
00:26:21Okay.
00:26:22Now, for one of the little examples that I like to give of Taglioni's attention to important details.
00:26:31On this racetrack, they wanted acceleration.
00:26:36It was not a top speed track.
00:26:39Daytona is not a top speed track.
00:26:42Generally, you gear for the infield and over rev on the bull.
00:26:48But what he did was he knew that nothing accelerates like compression ratio.
00:26:56Because compression ratio takes the pressure curve, the PV of the cylinder, and just raises it.
00:27:06It raises the whole thing.
00:27:08Compression helps everywhere.
00:27:11How could he run high compression?
00:27:14How high could he go in an air-cooled engine with a fair-sized, you know, like three-inch bore?
00:27:23Well, what is normally done is you raise the compression ratio until you are standing on detonation's doormat.
00:27:34And then you have to back up a little bit because you need detonation margin if you plan to finish.
00:27:41And I think that some of those British four-strokes at Daytona just knocked themselves out.
00:27:52So the thing with detonation is you want to reduce the cylinder head temperature.
00:27:57And you want to hold the unburned last parts of the charge to burn at a high temperature for the
00:28:08shortest possible time.
00:28:12That means you want fast burn.
00:28:14So he adds a second spark plug, a 10-millimeter, and end up with 34 degrees BTDC, which for an
00:28:25engine with a birdbath deep combustion chamber and piston dome, it's not bad.
00:28:33That's not bad at all, yep.
00:28:34But then, like Norton, realizing that they, in 1953, that they had to provide special cooling for the exhaust valve
00:28:47guides, spiral passages, a little heat exchanger on one of the form fast chassis downtubes.
00:28:55Taglioni adds an oil cooler, and the output from the oil cooler is led to the cylinder heads.
00:29:04It is a head cooler.
00:29:08Now, this is good thinking.
00:29:12That's what Harley called strategic cooling when they started adding the little water passages to their touring bikes.
00:29:18That's a Detroit phrase, yeah, strategic cooling.
00:29:19Strategic cooling.
00:29:21They were doing that in World War I aircraft engines.
00:29:25We just have to put a—
00:29:26Those big sixes that they ran, the water, the cooling water went to the exhaust valve seat regions from inside
00:29:35the water passage, you know, the water jacket in the heads, so that the valve seats were cooled first.
00:29:45And, of course, most of the cooling of the valve comes from the seat.
00:29:48So, anyway, here we are.
00:29:51Taglioni decides heads are running too hot, or he says, maybe I could eke out a little more compression if
00:29:59I could reduce the CHT, cylinder head temperature.
00:30:03So, I don't doubt that there are other things of the same nature that he did, but we don't know
00:30:10what they are because they're not part of the literature.
00:30:16Maybe Ian Falloon knows all this neat stuff.
00:30:19I hope so.
00:30:21Somebody should.
00:30:22Ian Falloon is a noted Ducati historian, and if you think you have a 750 MLA bike, you call Ian
00:30:28and let Ian take a really good look at it and compare its details with those of period photography and
00:30:36his vast storehouse of knowledge and obsession.
00:30:40You know, professional musician who loves, loves, loves Ducati's, Ducati historian.
00:30:46I can't remember if it was the cello or the oboe.
00:30:50Do you know?
00:30:50I don't know.
00:30:51I don't know.
00:30:52No.
00:30:52But he crashed.
00:30:53He crashed on a, I think it was a track day, but he crashed and he mangled his hands in
00:30:57it like it influenced his ability to play, but he really loved motorcycles as we do.
00:31:02Yes, because we know so many people personally who have had to overcome distressing injuries to ride again because we
00:31:18want to.
00:31:19Yes.
00:31:19So, Ducati's gear department was a capable one.
00:31:26Supposedly, they had no trouble running up whatever ratios turned out to be best.
00:31:33And, of course, you know that when modern day race teams arrive at a circuit where they haven't raced before,
00:31:40they have conferences after each practice and decide which ratios to put in the six locations.
00:31:52These MLA bikes were five speed.
00:31:55The Grand Prix 500s were six speeds.
00:32:05So, it's a disguised race bike.
00:32:10It looks production.
00:32:12It has that gaudy metal flake tank with the see-through stripe so you can see if there's any gas
00:32:18left.
00:32:19I don't think there's much in there.
00:32:23And there were modifications everywhere.
00:32:26It had 278 millimeter, as we see it now, from the 340 era, iron discs with Lockheed calipers and 29
00:32:47-degree steering head angle and a whacking great 60-inch wheelbase.
00:32:52And that 60-inch wheelbase is the signature of Ducati's big problem with the L-twin, which is the engine
00:33:05is made with axial fins for the lay-down cylinder.
00:33:10It's actually 15 degrees up from horizontal and perpendicular to the axis fins for the stand-up cylinder.
00:33:21That makes the engine very long.
00:33:24Now, in one account that I read, it said, oh, it was so marvelously clever that when the engine was
00:33:30designed that the gear shafts were placed one on top of the other to shorten the engine.
00:33:36Ducatis weren't first with this.
00:33:40Ducatis had built all those horizontal cylinders, singles, horizontal singles, and they had vertically stacked gearboxes for the very same
00:33:49common-sense reason.
00:33:52Well, they should have gone with flatheads, Kevin.
00:33:55Shorten it right up.
00:33:56Hey, Kevin shortens it, no question.
00:33:58And, of course, in later years, they did things like make the exhaust valve shorter so that the cam cover
00:34:05of the front cylinder could be canted slightly to allow the engine to move toward the front wheel just a
00:34:13little bit.
00:34:13Because if the front wheel touches the ground, you can steer, but if it's in the air, you might as
00:34:23well not have it.
00:34:24It could just as well be a chunk of lead.
00:34:29So, this has been a problem for Ducatis with the big V-Twin for years.
00:34:37The 500 had a shorter wheelbase.
00:34:39It was 56.4, I think, but it had a little short stroke.
00:34:44And it could be also that in that design, everything was sort of scrunched in order to have a shorter
00:34:52wheelbase.
00:34:53Why do we want a shorter wheelbase?
00:34:54It makes the bike faster turning.
00:34:59I was reading about Imla today, and it talks about direction changing, but this was before these changes were made,
00:35:06that it was basically a fairly high-speed track with not a lot of twisty stuff added to give spectators
00:35:20what they want most.
00:35:21I won't mention that, what it is.
00:35:24But it was decided at the time, supposedly, that the monster wheelbase, which slows steering down and which reduces the
00:35:36load on the front tire,
00:35:40which is when you're trying to accelerate out of a turn, and the front is pushing, pushing, pushing, you see
00:35:48the rider go,
00:35:51that's called, today it's called closing the front, losing the front because it reached its peak grip and started down
00:36:00the other side of the curve.
00:36:03But with speed being mostly pretty high during the Imola race, the 60-inch didn't seem to handicap them.
00:36:15And the history book says they finished one, too.
00:36:20In the early laps, there was Giacomo Agostini on a shaft drive lash-up MV that had had some soup
00:36:34-up stuff done to it.
00:36:36But he led for a few laps and then history.
00:36:42So this was a big surprise to a lot of people.
00:36:46All those British teams were accustomed to going to race after race and placing in various advantageous positions.
00:36:57But in this thing, they were out of it.
00:37:00It was Ducati's day.
00:37:04And, of course, as Mark alluded to earlier, Ducati phone, Paul was out.
00:37:13Maggie, his wife, answered, Barry Sheen's sister.
00:37:17And she said, yes, what is it?
00:37:20And they told her that Paul was being summoned.
00:37:27And she said, yes, he'll be there.
00:37:32And he was.
00:37:35But they had a list of people that they wanted.
00:37:38They wanted some top names.
00:37:39And they were either busy or didn't want to do it.
00:37:46Because who'd ever heard of Ducati, you know?
00:37:49I used to go by the motorcycle parking lot when I was a lowly college student.
00:37:55And I would see some of those single-cylinder Ducatis with their sensuously curvaceous fuel tanks.
00:38:05I liked those.
00:38:08And in later years, the Aprilia 250s, their chassis were so marvelously shaped.
00:38:17It made me think of Bren Cousy's Bird in Space sculpture, which was just a free-form curved object.
00:38:30But that's arty stuff.
00:38:34We're interested in winning races here.
00:38:38But it is part of the story because many people regard those early Ducatis as objects of worship.
00:38:49And you can bet that when this object is sold at the next auction, that it will command a tremendous
00:38:59price.
00:39:02Yeah, one of eight bikes, it's going to be at the Monterey, the Mecham auction during Monterey Car Week, August
00:39:0913th to 15th.
00:39:10So they're going to have this fellow out of Germany has that bike and the 750 Supersport 74 with the,
00:39:21I don't know, it was about 10,000 miles shown on the odometer.
00:39:25And it, you know, it looks at, that one didn't, that one wasn't a runner.
00:39:29Supposedly the, the MLS 750 was a runner.
00:39:33There were photographs of it being raced, vintage raced in Germany in the 80s.
00:39:37Guy with big, big curly hair, smiling, you know, 10 years after this was, I mean, it was just a
00:39:43used bike.
00:39:44That's the, that's the, the lot of race bikes usually is like, it was last year's thing.
00:39:50We don't need it anymore.
00:39:51Get rid of it.
00:39:52And especially, you know, going to Daytona and talking to John Long, uh, who was, uh, American road racer in
00:39:59the sixties, who went to Europe quite a bit, had a pretty great career and did a lot of racing.
00:40:04And he was, um, he said he would sell his bikes one year, he'd, he'd race them and then he
00:40:13would sell his privateer.
00:40:14Most of the time he would sell them and then somebody else would race them a couple of years and
00:40:20then he'd buy them back for nothing because he liked them and he wanted to have them, but they were
00:40:27just, yeah, they were just used.
00:40:29So, you know, 750 MLA, I mean, it was a very special moment for Ducati.
00:40:32And if you love Ducati, why you would, you would be delighted to maybe have that piece, but it's just
00:40:38a used bike.
00:40:38And, um, so to have a, have a crack at one of eight made, uh, we have, like I said,
00:40:46we have photos in the archive of the eight bikes lined up at the factory.
00:40:50Although seven, we understand seven.
00:40:52When you look at the glass van, there were seven in the glass van at Emola.
00:40:56Um, but all the details, um, it was interesting.
00:41:01You know, I looked at all the period photos of Spaggiari's bike and some of those guys.
00:41:07And I was telling Kevin in our conversations about this, the ignition switch is kind of under the rider's right
00:41:15cheek, basically behind the seat on a, one of the, like near the shock, I think.
00:41:20And it's just a, it's just a flat plate that's bolted to the frame and it's the negative terminal, the
00:41:25battery coming over.
00:41:26It's the ignition switch.
00:41:27It's coil ignition.
00:41:29As Kevin pointed out, they added a second spark plug.
00:41:33So you had the stock coils that were way up under the tank, kind of near the back.
00:41:36And then a couple of six volt coils that were bolted to the frame, uh, in the front.
00:41:41And here's the ignition switch.
00:41:42And we're going out to race a 200 mile race.
00:41:46And this ignition switch is a plate.
00:41:48It has like a pin in the middle and it has a U shaped stamp steel pivot.
00:41:54And you basically line it up so that the contacts connect the ground.
00:42:01And that's the switch, but it is, there's no detent.
00:42:04There was no safety wire.
00:42:06I'm just thinking like, oh God, we could easily turn this motorcycle off accidentally.
00:42:13It's just, it was a, it was a shocking thing to see.
00:42:17Um, I got a lot of, a lot of hours to study this bike, um, at Blackhawk.
00:42:22It's really neat.
00:42:23Of course, uh, many of you will know that, uh, American dirt trackers and some road racers
00:42:29too, used a piece of hacksaw blade taped to the handlebar, uh, that would ground the ignition.
00:42:39That's the kill switch.
00:42:42And when you think of it, would you trust a $25 toggle switch to the vibration on a
00:42:53KR 750 Harley?
00:42:57It does not have balance shafts in case you're wondering.
00:43:01Um, this, this kind of stone, simple thing, the, the steel is springy.
00:43:09It's not going to take a set and the ignition be shut off.
00:43:15Pretty reliable.
00:43:17Anyway, that's an aside.
00:43:19Uh, one of the things that happened during the development of the 500 GP, um, L twin was
00:43:29that, uh, it, let's see, where am I going with this?
00:43:39I know they experimented with four valve.
00:43:41I want to make sure we talked about that because that was very interesting to me because it,
00:43:44they, they did experiment with four valves and that was the, um, that later set of heads.
00:43:52But I think what I'm actually getting at is that when Taglioni saw the, uh, auto Valvolet
00:44:02engine with its steep intake ports, he didn't like four valves and I'll get back to that in
00:44:09a minute.
00:44:10He didn't like them, but he tried the steep ports on a two valve engine and it worked
00:44:17great.
00:44:18And he immediately adopted it.
00:44:21So this is proof that he was not just a crabby old guy who said no to the present day
00:44:31because
00:44:32he was living in the past.
00:44:34Now back to the, to the 500, it had four valves and in one version, the four valve made 65
00:44:43horsepower
00:44:43at 12,000 initially.
00:44:46And with development, it got to 69 horsepower at 12, five.
00:44:51Meanwhile, the two valve version had arrived at 71 horsepower.
00:44:57Now, Kenny Augustine, the late Kenny Augustine, um, at the time, the America's silent, but,
00:45:09um, brilliant, um, brilliant cylinder head specialist said, I can get as much air through a valve cross
00:45:19flow as these people are with their steep downdraft.
00:45:26And I, because of other statements he has made, which have been backed up by reality, I have
00:45:32to accept that.
00:45:33Anyway, this 500 was air cooled.
00:45:39So with two exhaust valves, you've got to do something to keep the bridge between the two
00:45:47exhaust valve seats from getting hot, expanding so much that it deforms the metal around it
00:45:54and then breaking with a click.
00:45:58When it cools, the ports were splayed and fins between, um, so each head had two exhaust pipes
00:46:14and having two separate exhaust ports meant that the head gathered heat from a greater surface
00:46:22area than if it had a single exhaust port.
00:46:25And I think that this probably limited the compression ratio of the four valve and it probably, um,
00:46:34well, let's just say compression ratio.
00:46:38So.
00:46:41Talioni's attitude after the experience with trying to develop a four valve and he had done
00:46:47four valve engines previously, air cooled, was four valves are just a fashionable thing.
00:46:55And we don't need eccentricity and we don't need those extra parts.
00:47:00Now he lived in a four valve world and the big rule, he lived in a two valve world, pardon
00:47:08me.
00:47:08He lived in that world just as the builders of the great air cooled airplane radial engines
00:47:18did.
00:47:18And their rule was the fewer, the fewer, the holes you make in the head, the less trouble
00:47:24you have with cracking and distortion.
00:47:29So, uh, he had, uh, his two valve engine had the fewest holes in the head and probably
00:47:42had less distortion and less trouble with heat than the four valve with all of its extra port
00:47:49surface area.
00:47:50So, uh, he was intolerant of four valves from then because he had had detailed, he made the
00:48:01attempt to develop a successful four valve cylinder head and the two valve had stayed ahead of it.
00:48:08And it might always for, uh, air cooled engines who can say, um, so, well, it harkens back to
00:48:20all of the four valves that had come before that, you know, they hadn't figured out how to solve
00:48:30all the compounding implications of four valves, as you described the heat and all the other
00:48:36problems, the surface area.
00:48:37Well, they had terrible materials for valves.
00:48:40And so they made, if they made the valve smaller, it was a shorter distance from the hottest
00:48:45point, the center of the valve head to the cool valve seat.
00:48:49And that was the reason why early engines used three or four valves, always two exhausts, that
00:48:58was to subject the exhaust valve and it's not yet ready for prime time material to the least
00:49:08heating, the least severe conditions.
00:49:12But clearly, uh, Taglioni had it under control with the two valve because it went the distance
00:49:18and won the race.
00:49:20And no, no, no better argument can be found in that world.
00:49:25Now, what happened in 73, they allowed the three fifties to run.
00:49:30And as, uh, my Australian, my Australian friend said, uh, in an email this morning, um, they
00:49:42hosed off the four strokes and, um, just like they had done at Daytona.
00:49:48So many people think that four strokes were killed, uh, at Daytona by the TZ 750, which
00:49:57some people call 700.
00:49:59There's no 700.
00:50:01There's no 700 in Yamaha literature.
00:50:03It is TZ 750A.
00:50:06In fact, what had happened was in 72 and 73, the race had been won by little dinky 350 twin
00:50:14Yamahas.
00:50:16First by Don Emney and then by Arno Sarnon.
00:50:19And there's a story that going around that says that when the engines were being built
00:50:23up for the 200 at Daytona in 73, that, uh, Sarnon insisted on having a fresh crank in his
00:50:32engine and there was only one left and Cal Carruthers tossed the crank to him.
00:50:41Um, well, I don't know.
00:50:46I think you'd have to be pretty angry to throw one of those crank shafts knowing that it takes
00:50:53more than 15 minutes to true one after it's been correctly assembled.
00:50:58I was going to say, but the thing is, Yamaha did not like to run, uh, roller crank pressed
00:51:07together engines more than 400 miles without replacing the crank shaft and probably Ducati
00:51:16had similar knowledge of their engines.
00:51:20The Mondial, uh, 125 single from the later fifties, uh, making close to 20 horsepower at
00:51:3113,000 RPM, new crank, every meeting, every race weekend.
00:51:36New crankshaft, new crankshaft, other crankshaft, either to be rebuilt or scrapped.
00:51:45So, uh, and then of course that was at a time when, um, vacuum remelted steels to make
00:51:54rolling the element bearings out of didn't exist yet.
00:51:57They were sort of commercialized around 1964.
00:52:01So, uh, Talioni would have had access to all that stuff.
00:52:06Um, so this is, this is a grand story.
00:52:13In 73, uh, while Saarinen was up front, Bruno Spagliari on the shorter stroke, more souped
00:52:23up Imla bike was second.
00:52:26Well, that had the special heads.
00:52:28It had the 60 degree, uh, it's been explained to me that they wanted to keep the, um, desmo
00:52:38mechanism unchanged because it was a well-proven, uh, valve drive system.
00:52:44So that meant that the tips of the valve stems had to be in the same place so that as
00:52:53the,
00:52:54uh, bore of the cylinder was made larger, the valve angle changed so that it was 63 point
00:53:05something in one case and 61 in another and what have you.
00:53:10So it wasn't, uh, a matter of, oh, this is the trend for the future because that trend
00:53:16was visible in 1947 when Burt Hopwood, the peripatetic Burt Hopwood who worked wherever
00:53:25there was engineer work, designed the Norton export twin with its lovely shallow Hemi head
00:53:34with a 58 degree included angle.
00:53:38And when, when Chrysler built their Hemi, what did it have?
00:53:4358.5.
00:53:46So it was out there narrowing valve angle.
00:53:51It was out there, but in this case, I think they did it simply out of convenience because
00:53:56they didn't want to design a whole new desmo mechanism, uh, for, uh, where the valve tips
00:54:05were going to end up in a bigger, in a bigger combustion chamber.
00:54:09So who knows, let's go to a seance and ask the darkness for the truth.
00:54:17Well, we could call Bruno Di Prato.
00:54:19He might tell us something.
00:54:20Yeah, he might.
00:54:21It's true.
00:54:22He's told me some wonderful stuff.
00:54:23Well, he was around, you know, Bruno, um, so when Cycle Magazine went to Italy to cover
00:54:29the building of the bikes, they spent a week prior to, uh, prior to the MLS 200, Phil Schilling
00:54:37and, uh, the art director at the time, whose name escapes me, but they went over with, um,
00:54:42you know, a hundred rolls of, uh, black and white Kodak Tri-X, probably 400 and just shot
00:54:48the daylights out of it.
00:54:49And Bruno Di Prato was the English speaking press person who kind of took them on the tour
00:54:55and arranged the meals with Dr. T and translated as much as he needed to.
00:55:03So, um, but yeah, what a time I think, uh, for the bike represents a couple of things.
00:55:12The twin, it represents the blueprint that Ducata used for every ensuing super bike, you
00:55:19know, 90 degree V twin.
00:55:21And it became, it did become their, you know, they became their trademark.
00:55:26They were a singles company.
00:55:27They were known for, you know, handy singles and, and then they became a twin company.
00:55:33And, you know, for anyone that's been around for as long as the twins have been around,
00:55:38Ducati is a twins company.
00:55:41But as we have discussed in the past, Ducati is a, is a technical company.
00:55:45They're looking for the, the technical solution.
00:55:48And when they went to MotoGP that they may have experimented with the twin, like, well,
00:55:52we know this pretty well, but you're not going to win MotoGP with that.
00:55:55And they made a four cylinder cause that was the engineering decision that needed to be
00:56:00made when Bordy came on and, and Bordy's like, forget this two valve stuff.
00:56:05You know, like I've been to Cosworth, let's do this.
00:56:08And, you know, he, he brought some bad ideas for motorcycling from Cosworth, you know, the,
00:56:13the long timings that you've always talked about, but, um, the story you told about
00:56:19Talioni's camp and Bordy's camp, you know, the wrestling of two valve.
00:56:23Oh yeah.
00:56:25What, what happened was that, uh, Bordy's group had gone to the track for track day
00:56:31and they were returning to the shop to put the bikes in and lock up.
00:56:36And when they got there, they found the Talioni group in, in residence and they wouldn't let
00:56:43them in.
00:56:46So fisticuffs resulted biff, pow, sacco.
00:56:51And no doubt, a lot of people standing around kind of, uh, I don't know what got into me.
00:56:59It just seemed like the thing to do at the time, but there was real, real enmity.
00:57:04And we know that Bordy's Autovalvo was the first Ducati ever to make over 100 horsepower.
00:57:13And it went from there.
00:57:17And, uh, they, Bordy commented at one point that the way that V-Twin was developed was no
00:57:26way to design an engine.
00:57:28It was sort of like they started racing and they had some problems.
00:57:32They had to fix the problems and then they changed the design a little bit and then more
00:57:37problems.
00:57:38And what you would like would be to start out with a unified up to the moment design, do
00:57:46the development on the dyno and test track and then go racing.
00:57:50Yeah.
00:57:52Bring money.
00:57:52But it, it, it wasn't how it happened then.
00:57:56But I want to add this other thing, which is that when, um, cook Nelson as rider and, and
00:58:04Phil Schilling, the late Phil Schilling as tuner, uh, won the 1977 Daytona superbike race.
00:58:13It was, it was a similar matter of timing that favored only them because they were, that was
00:58:26not a, a, a basically stock bike.
00:58:29It was a basically modified to death bike.
00:58:32They'd been working on it for five years.
00:58:36They had changed everything and they ended up.
00:58:38They had a relationship with the factory as well.
00:58:41I mean, there's.
00:58:42Sure they did.
00:58:42There was no, but the factory did not let them have any 60 degree heads and, uh, they
00:58:50didn't get on with Berliner either.
00:58:52And when, um, they won that race in Daytona, it was the last moment in which it was possible
00:59:03for a Ducati to win because the Japanese four cylinder bikes were being modified.
00:59:12The chassis were being modified.
00:59:15The front forks and swing arms may be modified or replaced was in the AMA rule book because
00:59:23somebody knew that street bike stuff is nothing you'd want if you're at the races.
00:59:30Somebody being Steve McLaughlin and John Ulrich, they, they wrote the initial super bike rules and Steve McLaughlin's furniture list
00:59:39department, uh, apartment as they, as they related to me recently at Daytona.
00:59:45Because his girlfriend or wife had moved out and so she took the furniture and, uh, but he invited John
00:59:50up with his then girlfriend, Trudy, who wrote on the bike and they sat on the floor with a typewriter
00:59:57and typed the rules, including throw that trash out and replace it with something that might work.
01:00:04So that we can end up with motorcycles that are actually race bikes.
01:00:08And the problem was that they, it took them, uh, from the beginning of the AMA thousand CC super bike
01:00:16class to, uh, the end of 1982, when that was replaced with a seven 50 class to get them.
01:00:24Um, well, if you look at, at, uh, John Owens's photo book, um, super bike, you will see that those
01:00:32late bikes look professionally prepared.
01:00:35They look like real race bikes.
01:00:38And when you look at the earlier ones, they don't have that look.
01:00:44And what happened will course was that they didn't realize that the Japanese were serious when they were asked why
01:00:53their bikes didn't have high quality.
01:00:54High speed handling.
01:00:55Oh, in us, you have 65 mile per hour speed limit.
01:01:01Ah, thank you.
01:01:04Now I understand, but those early super bikes were basically, uh, double the horsepower of a sixties triumph, six 50
01:01:15in a chassis of 1960s, uh, chassis suspension and tires.
01:01:23So there was trouble.
01:01:25Yeah.
01:01:25And it took that time to overcome that trouble.
01:01:28And by that time, the Japanese had moved on.
01:01:32They realized, oh, we have to make bikes that can be raced just as they, uh, come out of the
01:01:40crate.
01:01:41No welding, no bending, no secret stuff.
01:01:46And I mean, the, the Kawasaki was related to me, you know, it was with, I was eating dinner with
01:01:51John Long and, uh, Harry Klinsman and all these guys from the super bike era.
01:01:56Uh, you know, those first races at Daytona was, it was there with BMW and we had the R90s and
01:02:02Udo Gidl was there and Udo's son.
01:02:05And, and they were all saying, you know, yeah, the Kawasaki's made tons more power, but they could not get
01:02:10the power to the ground.
01:02:11They couldn't make the bike turn.
01:02:13They couldn't make them stop.
01:02:14And as you said, they had wobbly front suspension and all these problems.
01:02:18And, you know, they, they said, you know, those guys had all ridden that stuff and they said, you know,
01:02:24you'd roll the throttle on and everything would bend on a Kawasaki.
01:02:28It would go this way or that way.
01:02:29And it was just not, um, it's what gave BMW the window.
01:02:33I mean, Udo was able to take a flat twin, you know, thousand CC BMW, as you described, a 50
01:02:41mile engine at its height of development and making a lot of power for what it was, um, and taking
01:02:48that bike and making it what it exactly needed to be in 76 to do the job, not only to
01:02:54win the race at Daytona, but to take, take the championship.
01:03:01And throwing away, as you said, yeah.
01:03:05So that was the joke, uh, about the twin shock BMW suddenly having a monoshock.
01:03:11It said you could reposition the shocks and, uh, Udo joke was, I repositioned it to a shelf in the
01:03:18shop.
01:03:19Yep.
01:03:20Parks department.
01:03:22Good one.
01:03:24Yeah.
01:03:24So, uh, that success winning the Daytona superbike race in 77 lit the U S market up the Ducati winning
01:03:35in 77 Ducati.
01:03:37Yes.
01:03:37And, uh, because for a lot of people that I've talked to from that in that era, uh, Ducati.
01:03:44Oh, it's big on European flair, but what have they done lately?
01:03:49Well, they've done this and this.
01:03:51And they are, uh, a powerful technical company making beautiful motorcycles.
01:04:03Um, and they're locked in a tight battle with Aprilia, also an Italian manufacturer in MotoGP.
01:04:12So what, what could be better?
01:04:15Yeah, it's a, it was a real, you know, I mean, I know it was years apart, but it was
01:04:20a, for Ducati's legend in the United States, I didn't hurt that the bikes were very pretty.
01:04:27And the, the round case engine is gorgeous.
01:04:30You know, it, it, it has an aesthetic appeal.
01:04:33It has a round steel tubular frame, uh, the fairing shape, lovely, the tank shape, lovely, the little, the little
01:04:40humpback seat, all that stuff.
01:04:43The long wheelbase, it's, it has a real elegance to it.
01:04:46That's fine, but it actually worked.
01:04:48That was the thing is it worked perfectly for them in 72 and, you know, Phil and cook could go
01:04:56to the formula one gear cutter guy and get the gears hardened and to do all the things that made
01:05:01that motorcycle capable of doing what it could do.
01:05:06And then cook's, you know, cook was a drag racer at first.
01:05:10He was, you know, he was, I think one of his great lines was, uh, when he was, he wrote,
01:05:15he wrote for us about drag racing, uh, XLCH Harleys.
01:05:19He was a Harley sportster drag guy and it was, uh, nitro, the golden trust engine torching bitch goddess.
01:05:27Yes.
01:05:29So spectacular, but he, he was also, you know, learning to road race as that bike was maturing under him.
01:05:36And they, and let's not leave out typing in an office for money, typing in an office for money.
01:05:43You betcha.
01:05:45Yeah.
01:05:45All of that.
01:05:46And, uh, just, but it really set, I mean, it, it set the hook in the market for, uh, for
01:05:55Ducati and in big bikes.
01:05:56And then you had Halewood and, you know, Halewood going, yeah, winning at Isle of Man.
01:06:03And, um, again, it proved that the bikes were capable and by the way, they looked pretty darn good.
01:06:09And then they just took it from there.
01:06:11And as you said, you know, they were kind of band-aiding as, uh, as Bordy said, it was no
01:06:16way to develop a motorcycle engine, but they were doing it.
01:06:19And they kept doing it.
01:06:20And then they made some real strides.
01:06:23And when the funding was good, you know, they were, they were doing well.
01:06:26And now look at them now.
01:06:30I mean, God, it's just.
01:06:32Well, the current CEO, uh, Claudio Domenicali, uh, announced a policy some years back in which he's basically said, no
01:06:42more of this European flair, baloney.
01:06:46We're going to build motorcycles that have the best performance available.
01:06:55No qualifiers, the best.
01:06:58Well, Domenicali, you know, he came on as an engineer.
01:07:02You, do you remember how many were on when he was hired?
01:07:06It was very few.
01:07:06It was like, oh, we have three or five engineers or something when Claudio was first hired.
01:07:12And so he came up as an engineer working on, you know, engines and stuff.
01:07:18And, uh, and, and now he's running the company, the bike you're talking about.
01:07:23And the period you're talking about is the post, uh, tour blanche era.
01:07:26So we had the design of the nine, nine, nine in that period.
01:07:31And that in itself is a really interesting time and story.
01:07:35But the 1098 and, you know, um, motorcycles at Ducati were geared for top speed.
01:07:42That's, that's how they did it.
01:07:44You know, Ducati monster.
01:07:45Yeah.
01:07:45Geared for top speed.
01:07:46You know, they would, they would find the ratios and you had tall gearing and, you know, like my 95
01:07:52Ducati 900 SS, it feels spectacular at like 105 miles an hour.
01:07:57I mean, amazing.
01:07:59And if you're in six gear and you're going 60, no, it's like, you know, it's.
01:08:05It's just really not there.
01:08:06The 1098 is when they Ducati made all of those definitions.
01:08:10They said, this bike, we're going to compete head to head in quarter mile.
01:08:14And they geared the bike to do a really good quarter mile time.
01:08:17It wasn't, you know, it wasn't just strictly geared for top speeds.
01:08:20And how do we do this?
01:08:22They were actually very honest about their power output and very honest about their actual weights, which.
01:08:28I'm not sure where we are these days.
01:08:31You know, it's been all over the map, but they did change that policy a little bit just because everybody
01:08:36else was, you know, fibbing or it was like, well, we're, you know, as they say, where's the crank?
01:08:41Where's the horsepower measured?
01:08:43Oh, it's measured at the crank.
01:08:44Oh, it's measured at the connecting rod.
01:08:45Oh, it's measured at the combustion chamber.
01:08:48You know, the zero loss or less than zero.
01:08:51So measured at the PR, uh, copywriters pinpoint.
01:08:56Yeah.
01:08:57But, um, yeah, they did.
01:09:00They did what they do.
01:09:03They married themselves to technical merit and equality.
01:09:06They didn't, we're not going to rely on Italian flair and was, this is how we do it.
01:09:12You know, it's like what BMW did.
01:09:13I mean, that was a massive cultural transformation for, for BMW to say, we're going to build an inline four
01:09:20cylinder super bike.
01:09:21But we're a, we're a flat twins company.
01:09:23No, we're going to build an inline, I mean, to get that to happen, because there was an old guard
01:09:28that did not want that to happen.
01:09:30They had the turn signals.
01:09:31Like there isn't a BMW left where you hit your thumb up to turn right for the turn signal and
01:09:37you hit your thumb up left.
01:09:39And then you cancel with the flat button on the other side.
01:09:41Like they threw all that in the trash and they built an inline four cylinder super bike with a telescopic
01:09:47fork, like no telelever, no Hossack stuff.
01:09:51Just a fork, right?
01:09:52Like, we know this works.
01:09:53Like, can we just do this, folks?
01:09:56And they just went for it, you know?
01:09:58And the problem was, and this was sad, that they have, of course, BMW have tremendous engine experience.
01:10:06But it was in Formula One at that time.
01:10:10And the guys on those bikes would get in the lead, lead five laps, and then they'd start racing backwards
01:10:18because they were tire eaters.
01:10:21They had power bands with steep rates of torque rise.
01:10:26And it took time for them to understand a different type of torque curve is required for motorcycle use because
01:10:38they have so little footprint.
01:10:41That footprint, we must be so kind to it.
01:10:45We must take every care to keep the tire to pavement contact consistent, not smoking, not sliding, accelerating and going
01:10:59forward.
01:11:00And they got it right.
01:11:01They got it right.
01:11:02And they went after it.
01:11:03And Toprakra's got Ljoglu, won three championships on BMW.
01:11:12So this shows that nobody just engineers things like crazy and wins races, no question about it.
01:11:29That used to be Honda's deal, Honda enters, Honda wins.
01:11:34But we've seen with both Honda and Yamaha that something happened around COVID time.
01:11:42Maybe the chassis suffered from that disease because it's taken them until now.
01:11:50Yamaha have hardly advanced at all.
01:11:52Honda is showing promise.
01:11:53Where did it go, this tremendous dominance that they once had with Marc Marquez?
01:12:03Engineering is tough because they're tough, experienced, imaginative engineers in the other shops.
01:12:15And I saw this years ago when Ducati was constantly changing their displacement, 851, 888, 926, 996, 998.
01:12:30They never made a mistake with combustion.
01:12:33They had rapid combustion throughout where Japanese brands would try to shorten the stroke, make the bore bigger so that
01:12:43they could have bigger valves, higher revs.
01:12:45Oh, we have to go back to the other because we couldn't get the power from this one.
01:12:50Or Muzzy talking about it took two years when there was the stroke change to a shorter stroke, took two
01:12:57years to equal the power of the previous engine.
01:13:00They did not have a clear method of optimizing combustion speed.
01:13:07Ducati did.
01:13:14So, incidentally, in 1919, S.D. Heron, the father of the air-cooled radial aircraft engine cylinder head,
01:13:29designed a 90-degree V-twin for Hotchkiss BSA.
01:13:38That's just a little bit of bar chat.
01:13:43But interesting because S.D. Heron was a very important person during World War II and the years leading up
01:13:50to it.
01:13:52And who knows how deeply any of these engineers delves into the past because it is enriching.
01:14:02There are things there.
01:14:04People have made sense out of things in the past that haven't made sense since.
01:14:12So, it's a good idea to go up the street and drink in a different bar and hang out with
01:14:18a different crowd from time to time.
01:14:20Read old books.
01:14:22Read old books.
01:14:23Read old books.
01:14:24And, I mean, it's absolutely true.
01:14:27We've got to correct.
01:14:28Top Rack won two championships on BMW and he won one of them on Yamaha.
01:14:33But he did.
01:14:34He won two in a row on BMW.
01:14:36So, high five.
01:14:38Yep.
01:14:39Well, thank you.
01:14:40Thanks for joining us, folks.
01:14:41If you're dying to get your hands on an MLS 750, August 13th to the 15th, Mecham Monterey Auctions.
01:14:52Mecham Auctions Monterey.
01:14:54That's where you can see that bike offered along with the 74 Supersport.
01:14:59Pretty cool.
01:15:01Thanks for joining us.
01:15:02We'll see you in the comments and catch you next time.
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