Benzina 010

__Benzina___

t hanks to

team Benzina would like to thank: Ivar de Gier, Brian Ashley, Christine Smith, Pat Slinn, Richard Skelton, Joanna, Eve and Will. And - of course - all the contributors and advertisers. Sorry if we’ve forgotten anybody – your help and inspiration has been invaluable.

Front cover image Elise Waters

010 N

Words: Hans Jansens, Ian Gowanloch, Mark Williams, Ivar de Gier, Richard Varley, Gordon de la Mare, Alan Cathcart, Robert Smith, Rene Waters, Pat Slinn, Gary Inman, Howard Davies. Photos: Hans Jansen, Russ Murray, John Faulkner, Richard Varley, Paul Hart, A Herl, Kyoichi Nakamura, Robert Smith, Chipy Wood, Elise Waters, Pat Slinn, Vicki Smith. Brilliant effort, all of them, and much appreciated.

DO NOT PRINT THIS PAGE- USE AS GUIDE ONLY (ON INSIDE COVER)

BUT DO PRINT OPPOSITE PAGE!

Publisher & Editor Greg Pullen © 2012

www.teambenzina.co.uk

Chief photographic consultant Vicki Smith

www.ducati.net

Printed in the UK by Cambrian Printers Ltd

ISSN2043-0744

Lower Heath Ground, Easterton, Devizes SN10 4PX

Brakes photo right: Vicki Smith. More on the drum-braked MV Agusta F4 Special (below, right) on page 27, and on the Dondolino (bottom) on page 50

Veronica and TEL125 proving there’s more to motorcycling than motorcycles. One of these MVs gets a mention in the Fire Engine story later on, but blink and you’ll miss it.

Veronica and TEL125 proving there’s more to motorcycling than motorcycles. One of these MVs gets a mention in the Fire Engine story later on, but blink and you’ll miss it.

BIG ISSUE

Riding’s About More Than Just Motorcycles

Amotorcycle – especially an old, Italian motorcycle – needs a surprising amount of paraphernalia if it isn’t to become, at best, a museum piece or, at worst, a liability. A household’s less bike-centric members might even see an unused motorcycle as an asset worth selling off to fund something useful. Like a big TV, or even a nice little car. So the things and people who make motorcycling what it is, like riding gear, fuel stations, and engineers, are as important as your motorcycle, and are celebrated in this edition of benzina. People like the brilliant engineers Lino Tonti and Arturo Magni as well as Mr Dainese himself. The first thing most riders covert is a leather jacket, an item of clothing so iconic only motorcyclists and military pilots can legitimately wear one. So we’ve the thoughts of master artisan Lino Dainese on his life in leather, and how he felt compelled to make the motorcyclists’ lot a safer one after riding to England from his native Italy.

But first up is the sad demise of the small independent filling station, where you could not only get fuel but also gain access to advice, tools and even a workshop if things were going badly. It’s easy to forget that many of our roadside haunts, including the Ace Café and innumerable old-school dealerships, came with petrol pumps attached. Sadly those small old fuel stops are becoming just another sepia-tinted memory as petrol stations get bigger and more like supermarkets than anything connected to motoring. The traditional service station has gone the same way as the small motorcycle workshop-cumshowroom. They were bulldozed aside by big boys with moto-palaces built by marketing gurus to feel more like electrical retailers than the sort of oil-under-the-fingernails dealerships we grew up with. Yet while the giant hoardings

on the walls of these temples of desire might show motorcycles, sitting astride them are glamorous dudes and dudesses who look nothing like the sort of people usually seen on a bike. And now even these dealers of the Brave New World might prove to be temporary custodians of brand values as manufacturers dip their toes into the murky waters of selling online. Where will we ride to then?

Well, there are plenty of ideas in this issue – the final instalment of Richard Varley’s tour of Italian Cols, along with Pat Slinn’s memories of racing in Japan with fellow legends Steve Wynne, George Fogarty and Tony Rutter. Or if you like a more relaxed approach to travelling, Alan Cathcart uses an original Multistrada to explore the beauty of Puglia. And when you’ve supped your fill of Tarmac, the inimitable Mark William’s shares his thoughts on what Italian trial bikes really excel at – looking good in sunny piazzas, as it happens.

There are also the thoughts of Hans Jansens on the new Morini Rebello – yes, he’s seen the controversially styled new bike in the flesh – and Ian Gowanloch’s personal insight into how Audi’s takeover of Ducati fits into its history. Last but not least, Howard Davies of widecase.com offers advice on buying Ducati widecase singles. Which, as usual with fine Italian motorcycles, boils down to this; you should. So many motorcycles, so little time. Bags me the magnesium alloy beauty of the Moto Guzzi Dondolino on page 27.

Enjoy benzina #010

Greg

Photo: Russ Murray

Photo: Russ Murray

Pump It Up

A fond farewell to the humble filling station

An old filling station becomes a temporary (aka “pop-up”)Shrimpy’s restaurant overlooking the Thames prior to demolition and redevelopment in 2014

Petrol, gas, benzina: call it what you will, but without fuel a motorcycle is just a collection of parts taking up garage space. For most of us getting fuel used to mean a visit to either a filling station (pretty much petrol for sale and nothing else) or a service station where (you guessed it) there was servicing and repair on offer as well as fuel.

Motorcyclists have an understandable interest in filling stations, with 100-150 mile being the typical range of most motorcycles compared to 300-plus for other road users. Judging by the photographs floating around the net, motorcyclists also seem to have an unhealthy interest in photographing their period bikes in front of rusting old pumps. And why not? It certainly accentuates any new paintwork or chrome.

I've fond memories of petrol stations, moonlighting at a handful during fifth and sixth form, partly explaining exam grades as well as how a school kid was running a motorcycle. Back then a pump jockey (as we liked to think of ourselves) would not only fill the tank while you sat in your nice, warm car, we'd be expected to check oil and battery fluids. There was commission to be earned by selling anything overand-above the petrol, and a friend already in the job was happy to explain how polite enquiries meant prizes. Like offering to check the oil as quickly as possible because the sooner you got that dipstick out, the lower the oil level would appear, with plenty of it still up in the head and galleries. Cringeworthy now, knowing what can happen to an overfilled engine, but back then all cars used a fair bit. Or so we told ourselves.

opposite: the octogenarian owner of a garage at Stockbridge closed it when EU rules banned pumps from dispensing to cars on the roadside. The same fate befell the pumps my father used at Padstow in the 1970s (bottom right)

A Moto Guzzi Falcone rests by one of the many old pumps at the Sammy Miller Museum patois took this in the Sonoran desert. Wonder if they still serve you, like the attendant in the mobil garage opposite? Brown coat is very arkwright - bet he’s wearing a tie

ramsbury

Steeple ashton + ducati darmah

Agip station in Formia, on the west coast of Italy, with the mountains of the Parco Naturale dei Monti Auruncimore in the background. Fill up here and 80 miles further south is Naples and the gateway to the Amalfi coast, one of the most legendary roads in the world. Splendid in 1956 when this photograph was taken, but a bloated slow-worm of tourist busses today. Still worth travelling, though, and worth a 6am start-engines call. Photo: eni

It’s also amazing how much oil you could drain out of an apparently empty can if you left it upended overnight. Exactly enough for an oil change in a Honda 125 every six months, as it happens…

Next up was trying to convince folk to buy a new battery. In today's terms a battery cost around £150 so people were paranoid about checking them and making sure the lights weren’t left on. A generous offer to check tyre pressures might also lead to spotting illegally worn treads, and the sale of a pair of tyres. The only job that might have been begrudged was cleaning windscreens - no money to earn, and a real risk of waiting customers moving on to the next garage before we got to them.

Because here's the thing - there were around 500 cars for every petrol station 30 or 40 years ago, compared to nearly 4,000 today. Every other village seemed to have a filling station and a mile from where we hold our tea-and-cakes meetings was a thatched cottage with a petrol pump in the front garden. A little further afield, hidden down a country lane, is Wayside Garage; home to the much-missed Ollie Bridewell and his brother Tommy, who still wrings the neck of a big Beemer in British Superbikes on his weekends off. Because Tommy, like his late brother and their father and grandfather before them, run a tiny village service station, which used to mean putting down the spanners or dragging themselves from underneath a car to fill the tank of a waiting local. These days Tommy and his Dad will still fix your car or motorcycle, but the fuel pumps have long gone. Along with the few remaining locals, these days everybody queues at the big national (and international) chains selling fuel at pennies-per-litre less than any independent retailer could hope to do. So a way of life has gone and for motorcyclists in unknown territory there’s the constant gamble on the distance to the next filling station when passing a forecourt cluttered with cars, barbeque charcoal, soggy newspapers and tacky gifts for forgetful sons and husbands. If you do decide to stop and top-up you have to serve yourself, then queue behind someone doing the weekly shop, before you can finally pay. Assuming the cashier doesn’t insist on you taking off your helmet first (which means taking your gloves off) while the woman in the queue behind you tuts theatrically. It’s the same story at supermarkets (especially those self-service tills) and online shopping - we do all the work, and the chap who used to serve you has long gone. Along with his shop, the post office, library and everything else that made a small town tick. I'm sure there was at least as much delivery work back then too, because most shops would deliver, and of course stock had to get to them first.

This is why, fuel aside, everything's cheaper now in real terms than it was 60 years ago. But that also means far fewer semiskilled jobs are available. Some you win, some you lose. Or rather, some win, some lose. Along with small shops, pubs and village tea rooms, the independent filling station is all but extinct. Some of the buildings were fabulous, many from the great age of Art Deco, but few get reused. People have tried turning them into museums or themed restaurants, but the real money’s in knocking them down and building houses. So that’s what happens. Although a few became small, independent, motorcycle dealers they’ve all but gone now, usurped by the huge, corporately branded, homogenous showrooms. But even they might next to disappear as somewhere to ride out to: Ducati and others have had success with selling limited edition motorcycles via websites, and now the resurrected Moto Morini factory has decided you’ll only be able to buy their motorcycles online. The claim is they’ll be delivered through dealers who will undertake servicing and warranty work, but unless Morini expect the bikes to be desperately unreliable it’s surely naïve to expect a dealer to survive on servicing and warranty work alone. Just as there’s no money to be made in selling petrol unless you’re also selling coffee, sandwiches… everything, in fact, except service. At least the folk who ride old motorcycles know how to check things like the oil level. Other people might be in for a bit of a shock. B

Neil Procter finds the perfect spot to snap his Morini. Neil’s a professional photographer, as you might have guessed. opposite: Benzole was originally a petrol additive, using Mercury to add some (red?) bull about it Giving You Wings. They expanded into petrol supply before disappearing in the 1960s. We’ll Photoshop the Benzole into benzina for a tee-shirt if there’s demand.

(The gentle art of doing nothing)*

Il dolce far niente

* Colloquially - “Sweet Fanny Adams” wouldn’t translate literally, either. photos, clockwise from right: “Desert Storm” Granpasso; new Morini owners unveil new Rebello - is the chap on the left wearing a wig?; seat extends at the push of a button - same idea as a 1970s MV750; DIY dohc conversion to a 175; 125cc two-stroke, the first post-war Morini; Mauro shows off his restored Tresette

Words and photos: Hans Jansens

One of the good things about riding an Italian bike is that you actually have the country of origin around the corner. Well, you do if you live in the Netherlands. And even better, riding an Italian motorcycle to Italy is so much more enjoyable than just watching and having feelings for the wheeled wonders to come out of that country. So the perfect reason for going to Italy would be to travel down to an Italian motorcycle meeting to relax with friends and then, when the day’s riding is done, enjoying good food and wines.

The ride down south from the Netherlands is always an enjoyable one. You can skip the Dutch flatlands and the dull highways by moving into the Ardennes as quickly as possible, but from there on the party gets going. The Ardennes in Belgium, and particularly in Luxemburg, are beautiful and once in France you have the choice of riding the country roads towards Verdun or moving into the Vosges and the famous Schwarzwald (Black Forest) of Germany. Twisties galore, and some of the best riding in the world. For this trip I chose to ride from Verdun to Besancon and on into the Jura mountains. From here the Alps are only a stone's throw away, and once they’ve been crossed it's just a hundred kilometres or so to Morano sul Po in Piedmonte. This small village and the surrounding valley might be famous to most of the world for growing fabulous risotto rice, but for some of us it’s better known for hosting an annual Morini meeting. Or Moriniday as they call it. 2012 was the twenty-third event. We meet on the banks of the river Po, in the same old sports camp used by presidente Fulvio Surbone and his friends from the village for this years gathering. Luckily there’s a cool breeze blowing across the river because otherwise the mosquitoes would fly in from the surrounding rice fields and eat us all alive.

Arriving on Friday afternoon and chatting to people, as Morinis come and go –well, mainly come - it is already getting busy. People from nearby villages nearby come over to see what's going on and to enjoy the open-air kitchen serving local specialties alongside wines from the surrounding hills. Everything a Morini rider could need is here and within easy reach.

A new Morini is born!

In the evening one corner was dedicated to a newborn Morini: the Rebello Giubileo. This is the latest derivate of the 1200cc series, first seen in 2005, and the first new design from the latest owners of the Moto Morini name. Although the new firm is registered in Milan under the banner of Eagle Bike, the bikes are still to be built in Bologna. Naturally the showing of the Rebello nuovo generated plenty of discussion: will this model be the saviour of the famous marque? Is it smart to sell it only via the internet? And do we actually like it? Well.... as far as the last question is concerned, I haven't heard from anyone who actually did like it. Apart from a 1200cc engine that we already know and love (and the front forks) not much positive comment came from the Morini fans. And to be frank, even in the flesh, it's not very pretty. Too bad. Even so, they claim to have sold 600 over the internet and are being assembled this autumn. (Morini have now stopped taking orders, saying the Rebello’s entire 2012 production run is sold out- Ed)

The good news is that other 1200 models are also being produced again so existing owners can order parts and new owners can be welcomed to the Morini fan club. The Granpasso was also shown in a new colourscheme, labelled 'Desert Storm'. An awkward name, perhaps, but it does looks good.

On Saturday the rally really gets going. The weather is perfect, and at one point the whole site is home to over a hundred Morinis, of all ages and models: at least one of every example – even the rarest production modelsseems to be present. Lots of people gather for lunch, as always in Italy the main meal of the day, and combined with good wine it makes everything seem even more enjoyable than it already is. Then there’s an afternoon tour through the surrounding hills (After a big Italian lunch with wine? Very Italian – Ed). Instead of one, long, slow line crawling across the mountains, speeds get serious, and a girl on a 3½ Sport almost misses a sharp uphill bend. Fortunately she keeps the shiny side up. And looking back, the large Morini-snake crossing the mountain roads is a beautiful sight.

photos, clockwise from right: Valentini bikes on parade; no expense spared restaurant facilities; late sixties 250 Rebello; lusting after an original fifties Rebello 175 racer - just a shame photos don’t do sound; apparently abandoned 500 racer, with fabulously scuffed tyres; pert Scrambler bums. You can see more of Hans’ writing and photos at www.impaginator.nl

Along with the expected classics, this year brought a large turnout of the bikes from the past six years, like the Granpasso and Corsaro. And then there were the beautifully prepared classic racebikes. One was simply lifted from a van, leaned against a tent pole and left there. Where the owner went no one knows. And then a crowd gathered as an original 1950s Rebello is fired up. Brilliant events within an event.

There’s also a line-up of Valentini specials attracting plenty of spectators. Valentini was a seventies tuner from Prato who made kits for the 350cc models consisting of bodywork, two-into-one exhaust systems, rearsets and more. Nowadays they are considered classics in their own right and the bodywork has actually been put back into production. Valentini was also the tuner for the Moto Morini Camels that were entered in the Paris-Dakar and other rallies.

As quickly as people had appeared, they disappeared as evening approached. A small group remained for dinner and the party afterwards with a lottery - and a real Italian disco band!

On Sunday morning Franco Lambertini (the genius behind all Morini’s V-twins, interviewed in benzina #4) showed up with some great anecdotes and was happily answering questions. Unfortunately one his answers confirmed he isn’t working with the new owners of Morini. Perhaps his best story was about the high speed test runs with the first 3½ Sports on an autostrada near Bologna. At first, holding a stopwatch, everybody was pretty amazed at how fast the bike was, and thought there must have been a mistake in timing the bike. When a second run confirmed the high top speed the guy responsible for marketing decided to raise the proposed list price by some hundreds of lire!

Anyway, after pranzo it's bye-bye and ‘till next time. Let's hope the weather is the same next year, because the atmosphere, food and wines will certainly be as good as they always are.

Tomorrow Calling

this is what morini are staking their future on - the Rebello 1200 Giubileo. Giubileo means Jubilee, as in 75 years of Moto Morini. This gets pointed out everywhere from the logo on the seat to the small sticker on the headlight (left). Apparently sold out for 2012, even at a list price of 13,900 euros (around £11k), the 130bhp/198Kg (wet, apart from fuel) bruiser comes across as a tweaked Scrambler which is no bad thing. But, just months after Morini’s relaunch, the Scrambler is being offered at a 2,000 euro discount from its original price to now retail at just 7,900 eurosbarely more than £6,000, which is less than either the Guzzi V7 Stone or Ducati Monster 696 that offer around half the Scrambler’s 128bhp. The Scrambler might also look better than the Rebello, which is unfortunate when you discover Rebello means “Beautiful King.”

One way or another, the Rebello is Morini’s future. On the next page Ian Gowanloch, who almost certainly has more old Ducatis than anyone else on the planet (and will happily sell you spares for yours via his Italsparesducati listings on ebay.au), contemplates Ducati’s future - and past - under changing ownerships.

HAPPY FARM IAN GOWANLOCH

Back to the future

Afew months ago Ducati Meccanica was bought by the Volkswagen Group and placed under the management control of the Audi team. What does it mean? A fair bit I think, but first a bit of history. Ducati didn't begin the post Second World War period in good shape; their factory at Borgo Panigale had been completely destroyed by a very accurate bombing raid on the 12th of October, 1944 and to thwart the occupying army, tools, machines and people had been hidden all through Bologna and surrounding districts. There was total disarray.

Much of what Ducati had made before the war had no market afterwards. There was no money to buy high end electrical, electronic and photographic goods. Italy had been bombed, if not back to the stone age, then certainly a sizeable step towards it. The idea to produce the Cucciolo engine was inspired. Italians needed cheap transport that could dodge the bomb craters in the roads. It also well suited Ducati's understanding of precision engineering.

However, by the end of 1948 the Ducati works was bankrupt. Even though the Ducati brothers were proud that they had not assisted the Nazi war effort in any way, they received no compensation or assistance of any kind to help rebuild their factories. Their inability to repay the debts they incurred in financing the work themselves was their undoing. Ducati passed into state control and a third of a century of management-led highs and lows ensued. In March 1949 the factory was actually shut down for two weeks while state appointed managers argued that no more money should be invested in keeping the operation going.

Remarkably, almost from the beginning, the new engineering department at Ducati had a life all of its own. The unique Dr. Taglioni arrived in 1955 and immediately set about being very different. From around that time until the arrival of the Americans in the mid '90s an undercurrent of corruption spread through the factory. Bribes were demanded of suppliers in order that their components might be used on the production line. The suppliers hated it.

By 1970 the Italian motorcycle industry was in crisis. Small manufacturers were disappearing everywhere as more young people chose small cars rather than motorcycles as their preferred form of transport. Ducati's production numbers were very small and their prices quite high. What to do? Make a large capacity road bike, something they were not familiar with. Somewhere in Dr T's mind the concept was already well developed. The principles had already been proven with a 500 GP bike. The 750 GT was in production in a very short period of time and its derivatives are now widely regarded as being among the most desirable bikes of the era.

All through the '70s, factory policy vacillated between

being pro and anti racing as various managers came and went. The bikes were obviously competitive. Despite a lack of continuous development, and the fact last minute decision making often led to ridiculously short preparation times, they often won. The mid 70s saw a disaster of a different kind. The transition from the 750 range to the 860s didn't go well. The styling was a disaster and the bikes had had little development mechanically. They were rejected by the market. At the same time the factory invested probably more than it could afford to in bringing parallel twins into production. They were almost bullet proof mechanically, but only almost. And they were also rejected by the market. The lack of sales at that time almost sent the factory broke. Again.

In 1980 the VM group, the state owned organisation at that time in control of Ducati, pondered whether the firm should be allowed to continue making motorcycles at all. Ducati's range of small diesel engines was successful but the motorcycle side of the business produced only a few thousand bikes a year and didn't make a profit. But a bright spark in VM's management recognised the name had a following and decided to implement some quality control to add to that image. Change in the factory proved difficult: well, impossible actually.

Within a few years Ducati Meccanica was for sale. A few parties showed interest and Cagiva somehow ended up with the prize. That was 1984, and almost immediately Cagiva‘s management announced the Ducati name would no longer be used and that the factory would produce engines for use in motorcycles branded Cagiva. Two things happened to change their minds. There was a massive outcry from aficionados world wide and Cagiva Alazzurras, particularly the 350, sat in showrooms, ignored by uninterested potential customers.

Almost immediately after the takeover, there was a clash of cultures between Cagiva managers and the workers in Bologna. Problems caused by a lack of managerial control, and a lack of understanding and respect on both sides, never went away. The water cooled, fuel injected, four valve per cylinder engines that were to catapult Ducati into the future underwent a difficult. By the early '90s, Cagiva had seriously run out of money. Component manufacturers eventually stopped supplying because they were not being paid for their products. Incomplete bikes filled the factory's warehouses. The American TPG investment group saw the possibility of investing money in management and production machinery to improve quality, productivity and profits. They understood well the business of money, but seemed to have little grasp of the business of motorcycles. This new clash of cultures was enormous and at times even comical. A feature of that time was the firm's inability to make a model that had wide market appeal over a prolonged period.

The last few years have been the most stable ever. Impressively modern quality control has been introduced at the factory but the company has still been a bit directionally vague in terms of model design.

In brief, there has been 66 years of chaos. Add in brilliance and despair and artistic creativity and near disaster. In many ways it has been a peculiarly Italian thing. Chaos is the byproduct of creativity; creativity  the illegitimate child of chaos.

A short distance across the plain from Borgo Panigale is the small town of Sant'Agata Bolognese where you will find the Lamborghini factory. The people from Audi took control of Lambo a few years ago. In that brief period sales have doubled and the cars have become something that people actually want to own rather than just lust after. Germans and Italians are very different people. As a generalisation I don't think Germans are as innately creative as Italians. They work at their products and designs, patiently perfecting them, honing their rough edges. For Italians creativity is more immediate, explosive even. And the end result is quite different.

The people from Audi left the Italians at Lamborghini doing what they do best and added what they do best to the mix.I expect more of the same at Ducati. Should be interesting times ahead. B

Fair comment?

Laverda owners’ club stalwart John Faulkner has no truck with anyone who criticises the Laverda 250 Chott - these are his and, although he’s also got some of Breganze’s big four-strokes, he passed on these photos with the note that read “The best model built by Moto Laverda - the 250 Chott. Do not listen to anyone who may foolishly try to deny this fact - they are obviously deranged.” But he will admit leaving them standing for long periods of time can lead to a nasty surprise at the magnesium alloy crankcases/crankshaft interface. John certainly wouldn’t advise leave your Chott out in the snow...

Photo and words: Greg Photo and words: Greg

OutRunning Of Road

Mark Williams

Mild In The Country

Little gives me more pleasure, or at least little that I can write about in a family magazine such as this, than leafing through the back issues of Benzina that Mr Editor Pullen kindly gave me before we arm-wrestled over terms and conditions of my employment. But observing the mouth-watering array of Italian machinery so stylishly presented in said pages, I cannot help but notice that not much of it is of the knobbly-tyred variety. And that, my friends, is a source of great dismay… although not surprise, because brilliant though they may be at all other forms of bikery, in the last 40 years the Italians haven’t really built a decent trailbike.

They have tried, I know, they have tried, but by any objective measure – admittedly a measure I’m generally a stranger to – what it comes down to is a catalogue of despair. And just before you choke into your Peroni, take a look at this:

Anything with a V-twin engine and knobbly tyres: Try picking it up after you’ve dropped it in the gloop… always assuming you got it as far as the gloop in the first place. And in the case of Cagiva’s Elefant, not a happy choice of name.

Aprilia Pegaso: Nice looking bike, but too heavy and too limited in the suspension department for real-world mudpluggery plus, as it’s Rotax-powered, it isn’t entirely Italian.

Beta Enduro: Well as I mentioned last time, the 125cc ‘stroker of mid-70s provenance was a willing little fellow and also nice and light, but the forks were apparently made out of chrome-plated lead. Okay, the more recent Beta Alps were better specc’d, but essentially they were trials bikes with bigger tanks and seats… and Suzuki engines.

Morini Camel: Again, the name says it all. And a trailbike with a left hand kickstart? Oh puhleeeease!

SWM: Now you’re talking, at least as far as competition machinery was concerned, but to make them viable against the then state-of-the-art Japanese enduro and moto-x machines, their engines were frighteningly peaky, and of course being Rotaxes, not Italian at all. And when packaged as trailbikes, they weren’t much milder and cost too much.

I think that’s probably enough for now, and I bet that those of you with long enough teeth, or who’ve spent far too long looking at yellowing copies of The MotorCycle, will be shouting about the wee capacity

Gileras, Ducatis, Morinis and even Parilla ‘Regolaritas’ that acquitted themselves so well in the International Six Day Trials of the 1950s and early ‘60s. And you would be right to do so. But (a) they weren’t in any way available for domestic consumption, and (b) were ridden by latterday gods who could run up mountains carrying a motorcycle in each hand, rebuild their engines in 30 seconds flat, and pull out a spare one hidden under a bush when all else failed, which it usually did.

Mind you, looking at the pics in Mick Walker’s sadly long out-of-print ISDT – The Olympics of Motorcycling, it’s hard not to foster a deep spiritual yearning for such punky-looking bikes, especially the Gileras with their gorgeous red and white tank graphics – see how superficial I am? – and one does wonder, well I do anyway, why the remaining Italian manufacturers haven’t replicated that look in the same way that Guzzi is now doing with some of its roadsters? But back in the days when I was a serious trailbiker and even a not-so serious enduroist, there was next to nothing available that was Italian and worthy of the name, with the possible exception of Laverda’s 250cc Chott.

Introduced in 1976, on paper the Chott was quite a tasty prospect. It had a relatively powerful (26bhp) engine boasting lightweight magnesium cases, a dry clutch and its chassis, whilst old-school in terms of suspension, featured a fully enclosed chaincase (c/f MZ and others) and did its job well enough. And of course being Italian, with its gold painted engine and fashionably chiseled tank, it looked the biz. But owing to much tut-tutting from the bean counters at Breganze, it lacked the direct oil injection sported by its lowlier and much cheaper competitors from further east, and unless you were a serious competition rider in those days, mixing up petroil was a messy and unnecessary business. And as a competition bike, the Chott just didn’t cut it because it wasn’t powerful enough and its awfully notchy gearbox lacked the slick action and the right ratios to render riding a five or six hour enduro a tolerable exercise. Plus, it had a troublesome Dell Orto carb and an underslung ‘zorst which issued a seductive invitation to rocks and stumps, namely “Come and abuse me.”

Which brings me, as it must, to the Ducati singles that by now my reader may well also be fuming about. Yes, the ohc 4-strokes built by the Bolognese during the 1960s and ‘70s were in many respects well suited to the dual-purpose indignity us oldsters call trailriding, especially the 350cc SCR version. They were lighter and mightier than the horrid old pushrod motors BSA/ Triumph were still sticking in what they optimistically marketed to off-road adventurers (and which in some cases were actually called ‘Adventurers’), and revved like the clappers but with good spread of torque. However whilst they, too, had their kickstart levers on the wrong and awkward side, at least they usually did start, even when hot, which is more than could be said for the Brit bikes.

Ducati dutifully packaged these delightful although electrically challenged motors in ‘street scrambler’ mode, but forgot to add wheels that were big enough to successfully negotiate the ruts and rocks that lay far from the madding crowds posing around on ‘em outside the local pizzeria. And their forks weren’t really long or progressively damped enough, either. All of which probably betrays the true purpose of Italian trailbikes back in the glory days: they were made for looking good on, not for going good on, so that all-in-all, if you did want to do anything much more than pretending that you rode them in anger off tarmac, you had to spend a lot of time and money making that possible. Commodities that most of us mudpluggers just didn’t have, then or indeed, now. B

This ISDT Gold Medal winning factory Lodola Regolarità sits in the Guzzi museum. “Regularity” (regolarità) events were popular in Italy during the 1960s, typically 2,000km events to test off road ability. Like the Motogiro, using such events to prove the capabilities of small capacity bikes was brilliant marketing. So Guzzi took the 235cc ohv Lodola and converted it for regolarità use, which happily made it competitive in international six-day trials (ISDTs). Having abandoned the 175 Lodola’s overhead cam (which complicated decokes) when relaunching the bike as a 235cc GT (like La Cicciolina), for ISDTs Guzzi retrofitted the ohc head and some works bikes also got 247cc and a 5 gears. Running alongside Stornellos the Guzzi team ran away with the “Silver Vase” at the 1963 ISDT in Czechoslovakia.

La Cicciolina PART III

No easel and oils on Richard’s Lodola - just Castrol Valvemaster and the bare necessities opposite, top: Lodola Regolaritas in action, imagined with the help of a computer rather than Richard’s talents. Such stuff as dreams are made of

So it was. As usual La Cicc started first kick and we were to say farewell to the hotel staff. Girls who waved nicely, smiled wistfully, blew kisses and watched us leave whilst secretly of the conviction that most of us were insane. My fantasy was that Miss Forza Italiana would somehow miraculously appear on a large Harley Davidson and say she was going our way, could she tag along? She was definitely an H-D girl (1200 Sportster Black, I imagine) with a neatly tailored snakeskin jacket. But no. Surely there’s an ‘app.’ that can make these things happen? I obviously have the wrong kind of mobile phone.

Our next hotel was to be the Hotel Savoia at the head of the Pordoi Pass. Gordon and I persuaded Dave to ride straight to the hotel and try to get some rest as he was clearly suffering. We would ride together towards Trento where Dave would turn north to head directly for Pordoi. But for some reason Dave missed the left turn at San Michele towards Pordoi and followed us towards Trento. As we approached the town, I led us off the trunk route. Gordon followed and to my astonishment Dave carried on. My last sighting was of him proceeding onto a flyover above our heads, neck craned over that wretched

GPS screen, which had caused nothing but trouble from the word go. He obviously hadn’t seen us turn off. There was nothing we could do. La Cicc. certainly couldn’t catch him now so we followed our planned route in the direction of Borso Valsugana. Our first objective was the Passo di Vezzena at an altitude of a mere 1,402 metres (4,600 feet). We then doubled back to the SS47 and continued past Borso and turned north through through Castelnuovo and Telve to the Passo Manghen, an altogether more impressive pass at 2,047 metres (6,715 feet). There is no level area at the top; it crosses a knife edge but the views are still worth stopping for. We also had to take photos and there, waiting for us was the Reliant Topless 3 x 2 of George and Celia. Gordon had to struggle to put the V-Strom on its sidestand on the knife-edge pass with no flat bit, with help from George and myself.

The trouble is that after a while I find I’m not quite sure what is level and I don’t trust sidestands entirely. Gordon seemed to have the same problem, I think, as I helped him find the ground with his high side boot. There are few more terrifying feelings than the moment when you come to a standstill and put your foot down where you think there should be solid ground and there’s nothing . You get this sudden sensation that there’s an eight foot drop where you were going to put your foot; it’s a

physical sensation, your brain starts to manufacture the perception that you are on the edge of a precipice, complete with all the body reactions. Yet it’s just an inch or two more than you expected.

Often, when descending to a hairpin turn I feel as though I have become momentarily disoriented and no longer have a precise feel for gravity, as though I could be a couple of degrees out either way. I think I’d have to spend a lot more time in the mountains to eliminate this feeling. What is certain is that on the really fast descenders, the German and Austrian riders, obviously have no such problem. They have a different kind of perceptual problem; an illusion of invincibility which affects self-preservation. They never seem to consider the possibility of an unforeseeable event around the next corner. We did hear of the odd bike crash in which bits of bike were strewn across the road but the riders were all okay. Also noticeable was the way in which they kept re-passing us. We would often see the same riders again and again. My medals of honor go to the girls riding pillion on these bikes; they really are clinging on for dear life!

La Cicc went on and on, up and down hills, engine spinning at impossible speeds, brakes squeaking and still doing ninety miles to the gallon. I know this because Gordon kept all sorts of data in his precious notebook, including how much fuel we were all buying. He also kept a detailed record of where we’d been, which I did not. I knew I was probably going to regret this negligence later, but right then I was living for the moment.

La Cicc’s back brake is considerably more use than the front, which squealed so horribly I avoided using it, except in emergencies, such as when I had to stop. I was developing a style of alpine riding which avoided the use of brakes at all wherever possible. The gearbox took a beating instead. Modern bikes, with their ABS equipped, four pot caliper disc brakes (which never fade) live on the front brake. If in doubt,

grab a handful of front brake. The rear brake is generally only used at very low speeds, maybe when filtering through traffic. Modern bikes are higher, heavier and under deceleration, usually caused by braking, weight shifts forward so that in the back brake can have no useful purpose and is best forgotten, unless of course, you have to hold the bike facing up a steep hill, when the dynamics are reversed and front brake use can cause embarrassment. Interestingly, the new fashion for longer, lower bikes with a low centre of gravity and rotation, 'cruisers' as they are called, are in a dynamic sense a step back towards older machines like the Lodola.

We dropped down through Cavalese and climbed the Passo di Lavaze (1,808m – 5,931 feet) which unlike Manghen, has a saddle shape with a lake and hotels. We had stopped to take photographs and relax when a man in a Lancia drew abreast of us. He was clearly interested in La Cicc. and asked if I would be going to Mandello for the ninetieth anniversary celebrations the following week. 'Unfortunately not,' I replied. 'Pity. You have come such a long way. You have ridden from England?'

He shook his head, in what I took to be awe, when I replied in the affirmative. 'I used to manage a hotel in Mandello del Lario,' he said, wistfully. The woman in the passenger seat, who I took to be his daughter, patted his arm as if comforting a child. I have noticed how La Cicc has this ability to remind the older generation of happy memories from the past. When passing through towns like Bolzano or Merano, people walking along the pavement would point at La Cicc and wave, telling whoever was with them, often a child, that it was a Lodola. The entrance to one petrol station was blocked by a coach whose driver and guide wanted to speak to me about the bike. Gordon said I was becoming a serial attention seeker but it was gratifying to stir people's memories and indeed their spirits. Italians have a great

passion for their machines whether Ferraris, Ducatis or Moto Guzzis and these are household names. They think of them the same way as we regard the Supermarine Spitfire; with love and reverence. The design and manufacture of their creations is a matter of industrial pride which is written through each and every machine like the writing in a stick of rock. I was in Mandello a couple of years ago and they still speak of the Moto Guzzi factory rowing eight which went to England in 1948 as the Italian national eight and won gold medals in the Olympic Games. Where else but in Italy would you find a motorcycle factory built beside an alpine lake?

We continued to the Costalunga Pass (1,752 metres –5,750 feet) and on towards Canazei where after a very sharp left, we began the twenty eight turns of the Pordoi Pass (2,239 metres – 7,346 feet). La Cicc had to work hard ‘against the collar’ with all eleven horses straining; accelerating hard in first, snatching second and then the bike would momentarily leap forward as the energy stored in the heavy flywheel was released, then I would wind it on to the next tornante, look at the descending road above - nothing coming the other way so I would swing out onto the ‘wrong’ side of the road and aim for the apex of the corner while keeping the power on. The next corner would come up all too soon, maybe a left hander with a car approaching the bend from the opposite direction while being overtaken by two BMW GS’s. Staying high to the outside of the bend and dropping to first gear, I would give her full throttle until she was ready for second again. And so on, like this, for twenty eight turns until at last we burst onto the broad saddle of the col to snatch third gear then fourth, accelerating through the town towards the Albergo Savoia.

Dave was fast asleep when we arrived. This time he had felt no disturbance in the force, which was worrying as, previously, I had believed that Dave never slept!

The head of the Passo Pordoi is a saddle shaped col and looming over it, like an ancient citadel close by to the north, are the jagged crags of Sassolungo (9,670 feet) and Sassopiatto while to the south is the peak of Belvedere. The road continues to Arabba in the East and it is, at Pordoi, the highest surfaced road in the Dolomites. The car park at the hotel was home to the usual suspects, George and Celia in the Rialto, several Morgan Plus 4s of different ages, several Mazdas, three recent BMW bikes, Gordon’s Suzuki, Dave’s Yamaha, Aaron’s Porsche and, of course, La Cicc. A footpath used by many walkers descended to the carpark from the Belvedere direction and one could sense the obvious delight of the walkers, many from Germany and Austria, whose eyes lit up at the sight of so many unusual vehicles. They wanted to know from whence we had come; and why? And where were we going? Some spent a lot of time looking at the Morgans, having never seen so many in one location or, perhaps, never having seen one before. What was certain was that they had never seen a Reliant 3 X 2 before either, and at least two Germans showed they had a sense of humour after all by exploding with laughter. 'Ah, Grosse Brittanien,' said one older hiker, seeing the GB plate on La, 'Have you ridden from England?' 'Yes,' I replied. 'All the way?' @Yes, why not?' Of course, I was being a little provocative; my backside tells me why not every time I get off the bike. 'How far?' 'Twelve hundred miles. Nineteen hundred kilometres, I suppose.' He shoom his head incredulously. 'You have to ride back?' 'Yes. I'm afraid so.' 'Amazing. Good luck.'

The thing about La Cicc. is she looks like a toy beside the giant modern BMWs and even as I look at her, it’s hard to believe that we have come so far. How our horizons and our expectations have changed and yet I have not been noticeably disadvantaged by choosing to come on what one member of the group termed 'a totally inappropriate machine'. Another had immediately retorted: 'No, on the

contrary, highly appropriate.' La Cicc was always at the centre of controversy, and rarely ignored.

Alan and Pam were having a run of bad luck with their Morgan Plus 8. It had been lovingly restored, with no expense spared, over an extended number of years and it looked beautiful. When the bonnet was opened along its centre hinge, a V8 was revealed in an engine bay which was cleaner than most hospital operating theatres but something in the electrical system, maybe the engine cooling fan, was cooking alternators. And there was a problem that left them at the foot of an alpine pass with hardly any brakes left; had the fluid boiled? The next morning at Pellizano they had donned overalls (the 'they’ will not have escaped you), bled the brakes and changed the oil while I fiddled with La Cicc’s carburettor, but they were unable to get anything done about the electrical problem and had resorted to switching the cooling fan off, ergo, no mountain passes. They had managed to get up to Pordoi by keeping the heater on at full blast in a losing race to keep the temperature down. They would spend a few days climbing the local peaks on foot, such as the Sassolungo. On reflection, I suspect that we were not the only casualties and, indeed, more problems were to befall La Cicc.

Before dinner Lufkin kindly bought me a spritzer. 'Are you sure old boy? Do they know what a spritzer is?' 'Como se dice in Italiano ‘spritzer’,” I asked the barmaid. 'Spritzer,' she said, expressionlessly. 'I’ll have one too,' said Bubbles. 'Anche per la.' 'Va bene. E Lei,' she indicated Lufkin. 'Una birra per favore.' 'I say,' said Lufkin, 'You speak the lingo?' 'Only a bit,” I replied, feeling as though I’d stepped back into the bygone age of the Woosters.

Having little in common with Lufkin and Bubbles, I nonetheless felt obliged to entertain them. Lufkin had already complained bitterly about German motorcyclists, saying that he found their behaviour so unacceptable that he almost felt like driving into them, so I thought I would redress the balance and tell him the story of Aaron’s positive experience in the tunnel a few days ago. When I got to the part where the German’s fist entered the Mercedes by way of the foolishly open driver’s window, they both recoiled in horror. Lufkin’s head seemed to shrink into his knitted tank top and Bubbles took a step back at this story of ‘beastliness’ on the cols. So much for social interaction. They soon found someone else to harangue, having first scanned the room for any German bikers who might have found their way in.

We sat at dinner, enjoying a panoramic view of the pass while the temperature dropped very quickly, and as it approached the dew point, banks of cloud began to form, obscuring the valleys below. I had heard there was a shrine to a local climbing hero in a hotel about two hundred metres away so Gordon and I decided to take a look after the meal. In the lobby of the hotel was a glass case containing a beautifully restored 1939 Moto Guzzi 250 - an Airone, I think, which had belonged to Tita Piaz, the 'Devil of the Dolomites', celebrated alpinist, author and sometime politician who, during the Fascist dictatorship, had spent some time in prison, presumably because of his opposition to Mussolini. Ironically, Moto Guzzi was also Mussolini’s personal choice of motorcycle for duties of State.

The Airone looked to be about the same size as a Lodola and had many features in common. The Lodola was in fact Carlo Guzzi’s last design (1955), so it was bound to have things like upside down forks and the carburettor looked very similar with its separate float chamber. Gordon considered ways of liberating the bike from its glass case; maybe replacing it with the V-Strom. We’d obviously had a bit too much to drink so we wove our way back through the mist, past a bar with thumping music, carousing bikers and cigarette smoke.

Attending the tour gets you a sticker - and incredible memories. Event is open to motorcycles, plus open top 3-wheelers and cars. Not sure that excuses the chopped Reliant opposite.

The next morning we were having breakfast at seven thirty as usual. A possible six passes lay ahead but exhaustion was beginning to set in. Dave’s face had swollen up and despite his denials, he was clearly not one hundred percent. For myself, I had missed so many passes that I was probably only in the running for the Tour de Cols equivalent of the Wooden Spoon, especially having missed a whole day on Tuesday.

We took it easy and did the Passo di Valles (2,033 metres –6,670 feet) and the Passo Fedaia (2,057 metres – 6,750 feet). My new interest was blasting through tunnels and galleries, making as much noise as possible. I noticed that La Cicc’s cylinder head was becoming covered with oil, leaking most probably from a rocker cover fastener which had stripped its thread when being reassembled at Pellizano; this is as close I’m going to get to an admission of guilt! Occasionally some oil would find its way onto the blued exhaust pipe and instantly vaporise with that unmistakable aroma. On a fifty two year old bike, threads in aluminium are going to wear out. It looked a lot worse than it was but I was concerned about oil loss; I couldn’t tell how much she was using.

Somehow or other Gordon and Dave missed that turn in Canazei and I found myself climbing to Pordoi without them. I went back to the hotel, showered and changed, expecting them to appear at any minute. Time for a capuccino. I haven’t mentioned coffee and we’ve been in Italy for a week. Coffee has been part of my life since I saw 'The Ipcress File’ back in the 1960s. Harry Palmer’s gritty character, played by a young Michael Caine, was somehow given another dimension by his requirement for real coffee while everyone else in Britain had only just discovered instant, that stuff that came in a glass jar, resembled volcanic ash and tasted like gravy browning. The coffee grinding and percolation is a shorthand in the film for seduction and sex and leads to Harry’s conquest. The implied sexiness of coffee and lovingly making real coffee didn’t escape a young lad who was looking for ways of impressing women. The first thing I did when I left home was buy a coffee grinder and an espresso maker. Now I’m all grown up I have a Pavoni espresso machine which looks like a chrome plated piece of Victorian railway equipment. The whole process of making coffee has become as important as drinking it; a complicated social ritual.

Even today, for all the talk of barristas and the huge coffee chains, the English seem for the most part to have missed the

point once again. They think it’s a beverage, like a quick cup of char to keep them going while they carry on working; like when the gas engineer arrives six hours later than arranged, to repair the boiler. 'Would you like a cup of tea?' I ask. 'You got any coffee?' 'Expresso? Cappuccino?' He probably thinks I’m being sarcastic but he doesn’t want to take a chance that I’m serious. 'Haven’t you got Nescafe?' 'No, sorry,' 'Oh, I’ll have tea then.' 'Earl Grey or Yorkshire Breakfast Tea? I’ve also got some Lapsang Suchong.' Six hours late indeed!

In Italy, excellent coffee is the rule rather than the exception and we were quite happy to sit on the hotel terrace under the gaze of Sassolungo, chat and drink coffee and eat cake all afternoon, but after about twenty minutes Gordon hurtled into the car park looking seriously harassed. 'Dave’s been knocked off his bike,' he reported anxiously as he struggled to leap from the V-Strom in one unrehearsed balletic move that would have tested Dame Margot Fonteyn in her day. We hardly had time to absorb this information when down the road, his voice shifted several octaves by the Doppler Effect, but heard clearly over the roar of his Yamaha, came Dave. The Devil of the Dolomites had returned. He entered the car park at high speed, not once checking his GPS. One instinctively knew it was serious! His bike bike wasn’t much damaged and the car driver in question had been dealt with by some German motorcyclists and the Carabinieri, in that order, but he was understandably angry and shaken up. He had finally become the victim of some of the careless driving that Lufkin had noted the day before.

The standard of driving in both France and Italy is poor. I hate to say this because I enjoy driving in both countries but I know a few people who don’t. Some American acquaintances, members of a Moto Guzzi Club in Seattle, emailed me on their return to the ‘States. They said they had never been so terrified in their lives and there was no way they were coming back to Europe. I had a more sanguine view; one had to enter into the lunacy of it in order to survive. The incident with Dave and others I had witnessed recently began to plant seeds of doubt in my mind. Yes, driving and riding in Europe are more dangerous than at home, especially when the roads are crowded. Generally the roads are less busy and there’s room for everyone but, when the numbers increase then behaviour seems to deteriorate and individuals become far more dangerous. I recalled that on the road from Sondrio to Pellizano, large trans-European trucks had missed me by inches in their haste to get past, clearly breaking every speed limit and not slowing for built up areas. I wondered what the road accident statistics were like; Ed put me in the picture. He lives for six months of the year in France and clearly loves the country. Appalling, he said.

The devil of the dolomites

Saturday would be the last day of the event for La Cicc as I had already decided to leave a day early. I had to cover eighteen hundred kilometres between Sunday morning and Wednesday afternoon.

My average speed was likely to be around fifty kilometres per hour and I couldn't use autoroutes, so I’d got nineteen hours of riding plus stops for coffee, say twenty two hours over three and a half days and that was without any holdups or breakdowns. If I left on Monday the stats would be worse. I needed to be within striking distance of Le Havre by Tuesday night to be on the dock in Le Havre by two thirty on Wednesday afternoon. 'If I go now,' I said to Dave and Gordon, as I topped up the oil tank with half a litre of SAE 40,'You will be free to travel faster. You can use the Autoroutes and we’ll probably all arrive at the ferry terminal at around the same time. A pursuit race and the competitor with the biggest handicap leaves first.'

My first objective was to find a quick way into Switzerland and early Sunday afternoon found me drawn towards the Stelvio Pass from the direction of Trafoi. I don’t know if this way was any worse than any other approach but when I was maybe half way up, the remaining relentless turns became visible for the first time. From memory there are thirty seven turns but perhaps just ten from the top, La Cicc began misfiring badly and losing power. I did a quick U-turn and headed back towards Trafoi. My bid to take a shortcut to Davos Platz had been foiled.

I stopped half way down and took a track off the hairpin down to the Berghotel Franzenhohe where people sat, somewhat incongruously at tables along a terrace which faced the pass as it ascended, turn by turn, above them. All I wanted was to sit down and regroup; to look at my maps and find another route to Switzerland. I ordered a cappuccino and the waitress returned moments later as I spread my map over the table. She had noticed the bike and seemed quite chatty. 'German?' 'No, English,' I replied, 'And you?' 'Polish,' she said with a grin. 'Ah,' no wonder your English is so good.'

It soon became obvious that the only way was to go back past Trafoi and then turn north for Austria then west into eastern Switzerland. As I was leaving a hotel guest stopped by the bike. 'A real bike,' he said, “Even down to the oil leaks.' He was right. La Cicc was looking the worse for wear and oil had now spread over the front of the engine and formed

into brown tar on the exhaust pipe. I checked the oil level for good measure, not that I had any more to put in. The leak from the rocker cover was obviously getting worse but at least she still started first kick. I trickled off towards Trafoi and Spondig, where I turned left towards Venosta and Austria. At Sluderno I saw a sign for Switzerland, off to the left. Next time I’m there, I will take that road as I now realise it would have taken me to Zernez and Davos. No longer trusting my instincts I stopped and got the maps out whilst absentmindedly leaving the ignition on. When I realised what I had done, and this was only after several minutes, I tried to start the bike without success and a growing feeling of foreboding. La Cicc always starts first kick. Was I going to be stuck in Sluderno? No, as it happened, because after a few minutes of recovery the bike started and I took the road for Austria following the north side of the Alp towards Susch and then Davos. At the Austrian border a group of Austrian motorcyclists stopped and took photos of La Cicc. Near Davos we turned and headed for Landquart. I had memorised the the route and the towns came up without any nasty surprises until I arrived at Sass, about twelve kilometres from Landquart. There was a nice little restaurant and hotel, The Aquasana, so I pulled up on the hard standing outside. On a Sunday afternoon in this part of Switzerland in September, everything is pretty quiet. I arranged with the landlady for a room right up under the eaves of this Swiss chalet and took a much needed shower. I had an excellent meal of Schweinsteak in a hot chilli sauce with Rosti, preceded by a spritz and followed by fruit and an assortment of cheeses. Her husband cooked it and after I had finished he asked me to come outside to look at what was in his garage. As the door swung up, a dark blue Triumph Vitesse convertible was revealed. What he wanted was a GB plate like the one on La Cicc., could I get one for him? No problem I said, he was to consider it done. Overnight it rained heavily but, snug under those eaves, I slept soundly; better than I had for a week.

At breakfast I was joined by a Dutch couple who had arrived overnight on a Triumph Rocket 3, which dwarfed La Cicc, having ten times her engine capacity. The proprietor of the inn had covered La Cicc. with a plastic sheet at some time during the night, to protect her from the rain. The bill all in, when converted from Swiss Francs was 65 Euros or £56 for bed, breakfast and evening meal in a really comfortable, traditional Swiss Inn run by friendly people. It had stopped raining and I set off with the intention of reaching Besancon by early evening. As things turned out, that was not to be.

As I entered the tunnel after waiting at the roadworks, the bike began to misfire badly and it became touch and go as to whether I could coax her to the end of what turned out to be quite a long tunnel. These tunnels are the last place any motorcyclist wants to break down. There is usually a footpath but this is invariably protected by a high kerb with a heavily ogee curved edge, not something one could ride up or even lift a bike over. I was lucky and somehow she kept running until we were out into the daylight. We drifted downhill to silence and after a kilometre or so, we were on the outskirts of Landquart and came across Grisoni Racing’s Ducati Dealership, where I rolled to a halt on the forecourt. This turned out to be the end of La Cicciolina’s journey as, try as we might, we could not get her to start again. This time it was not a fuelling issue, but an electrical fault which would not be solved until several weeks later, at home in England. I knew it was either a battery or a coil problem but by the time I had tried my best to fix her without success, I had run out of time to meet the boat on Wednesday. AXA Recovery quickly assessed the situation and arranged for the bike to be shipped home while I was provided with a hire car - but that is another story. Suffice to say, if you are ever lost in the one way road system in Le Havre, don’t panic; just get off your bike or out of your car and walk to your destination. Then go back and do it in the vehicle! It will save you hours of frustration.

epilogue

Dave and Gordon caught up with me in Le Havre and together we travelled back to England.

La Cicciolina arrived home on a trailer, less than a week later and in perfect condition, which was a pleasant surprise and thanks in part to Grisoni Ducati who looked after her for me until she was picked up. Since then I have decoked her and had the stripped thread helicoiled. A new ignition coil has been fitted and she now looks none the worse for wear. I took the front wheel and brake assembly to SRM Engineering near Aberystwyth where they skimmed and trued the hub and brake shoes. I checked the charging system and all of its components and found no faults apart from one of the pinch bolts tensioning the dynamo drive belt had stripped its thread but, even as I write this I am thinking that in 1959, no motorcycle manufacturer in the world could have foreseen that one day their product would be expected to have its lights on at all times, day or night. I wonder?

As for her mechanical performance, there was no problem at all. The bike just kept going through rain or sunshine without a hiccup. The issue with the carburettor was, with hindsight and

la cicciolina’s* Vital Statistics (oddly similar to a lodola Gran Turismo) OHV 235cc: 11 bhp @ 6000rpm: 264lbs/120Kg price in GB (1960): £219 19s 10d including tax.

*la cicciolina was a slim young blonde of hungarian decent who became a porn star and then an Italian mp you can’t make this stuff up...

page 46 of the Owner’s Manual, preventable. The various oil leaks were minor and mostly down to my not taking enough trouble over assembly, although I hadn’t thought this at the time. Over the two thousand hard miles she used or lost less than a litre of oil.

What had I learned? Well, you can go all over Europe on an old bike without coming to much harm. You will be welcomed almost everywhere and most people are only too pleased to help. There is still romance in having a motorcycling adventure as long as you don’t overplan the trip. You don’t need to worry overmuch about what can go wrong and a degree of uncertainty only makes it more fun. I carried everything I needed in a single twenty litre bag and I still had two tee shirts that I hadn’t worn when I got home. The most important thing in the Alps is to have a machine which is light and manageable and to take a battery charger!

Whilst driving along the Swiss motorway between Wollerau and Zurich in the rental car, I was passed by a slim young woman on a very large, black Harley Davidson. She was wearing a snakeskin jacket and as she disappeared into the distance, from time to time a woof and warble of the vee-twin carried back to me. Finally, she was gone. B

DONDOLINO

th E lodola Wa S th E f I nal motorcycl E d ESIG n E d By carlo GU zz I , and th E maG n I f I c E nt dondol I no m IG ht hav E BEE n th E BES t. th IS IS th E S tory of ho W h IS 1920 prototyp E E volv E d I nto th E f I n ES t GE ntl E man’S rac E r a chap co U ld BU y I n 1946

Words: Greg Photos: Greg Paul Hart Vespamore Phtography

Hard to believe these images are recent, but the period atmosphere’s no accident. Paul Hart (vespamore. com) radically develops out-of-date film to produce something closer to art than digital junkies manage.

Dondolino

As a young engineer, Carlo Guzzi obsessed about motorcycles, but rather differently from the way we might today. Not for him dreams of long rides on challenging roads, but rather the hands-on experience of unravelling the broken dreams of other riders in his workshops on the shore of Lake Como. The Guzzi family had a holiday home nearby, in what was to become Mandello del Lario, and the Moto Guzzi HQ that stands there today is the oldest motorcycle factory in the world.

As a young Carlo dismantled failed engines this quiet, introverted, man fantasised about building a motorcycle that would be reliable, fast, and manageable by a rider of even Carlo’s modest stature. He disapproved of manual hand pumps that required a rider to provide a motor with its oil, when a moment’s inattention could seize an engine, especially if the rider was concentrating on another matter – racing, for example. Surely, Carlo thought, an engine could drive a pump? And the exposed chain which transferred a crankshaft’s power to the gearbox was dirty, dangerous and prone to breaking. An enclosed gear was the obvious solution for Carlo Guzzi, yet it took decades for other engine designers to see that he was right. But Carlo was more than an engine designer. He could see that designing an engine that could fit into a bicycle-style frame was never going to create a motorcycle as fine as one where the engine and cycle parts were designed from the start to work as a single machine. These are obvious ideas today, but in the years before the First World War, they amounted to radical thinking.

The prototype that Carlo finally built in 1920 survives as the first exhibit seen by visitors to Moto Guzzi’s museum. Despite a compression ratio of 3.5:1, necessitated by the poor quality of the fuel available, the motorcycle could achieve almost 100kp/h (62mph). On Italian roads in 1920 that was quite fast enough, especially since Carlo Guzzi had eschewed the received wisdom of building the largest capacity motorcycle possible. The world’s largest motorcycle manufacturers were American, with Indian and Harley-Davidson the market leaders. America’s wide open spaces led to long-distance record breaking and purpose-built racing venues which demanded horsepower and the ability to hold an engine flat out for long distances, but on Europe’s tight and twisting roads safe handling and low weight were at least as valuable as outright power, especially on the gravel-strewn tracks that passed for public highways. Europeans also expected to see their chosen marque succeed in racing and in 1920s Europe that meant competing on public roads which, although ostensibly closed to traffic during races, still resembled pretty much exactly the sort of environment road riders faced.

Indian had some success with their V-twins at the two great road races of the era, the Isle of Man TT and the Milano-Tarnto, but that didn’t stop them building a vertical 500cc single for racing just like the British bikes that went so well at the TT. The other reason that Indian took a sudden shine to building smaller, lighter, cheaper motorcycles was that big, expensive ones were beginning to be marginalised by the world’s growing economic woes and the arrival of mass produced cars. In the 1920s a single cylinder engine of between 350 and 500cc looked like a smart bet if you wanted to race and sell motorcycles.

Carlo’s 499cc engine was very oversquare, exceptional at the time, with an 82mm stroke pushing through an 88mm bore. Yet the most obvious difference from other singles was the cylinder lying horizontally in the frame, keeping weight low and making the most of the cooling airflow, as well as allowing his brother Giuseppe to design an especially low-slung frame. Carlo’s insistence on gear primary drive also required the crankshaft to run backwards compared to other engines of the time. Given that a gearbox must spin in the same direction as the rear wheel of a motorcycle, driving the gearbox by a chain from the crankshaft requires that it also spins in the same direction. Guzzi’s gear primary drive meant the crankshaft had to rotate in the opposite direction but even this

small detail was turned to an advantage by his designing the big end to throw oil up to lubricate the top wall of the cylinder. This attention to cooling and lubrication was one of the principal reasons the Guzzi “flat” singles (as they came to be know) became famous for their reliability and longevity.

The three-speed, hand-change gearbox was built in unit with the crankcases, which also enclosed the clutch. To keep the crankcases as compact as possible, another feature of Guzzi singles which debuted on the prototype was a huge external flywheel. This pressed steel disc was quickly nicknamed the “bacon slicer” and these big flywheels remained a feature of the flat singles right up until their final incarnation as the Nuovo Falcone in 1976, although by then at least it had a metal cover.

Guzzi’s backers might have been impressed by the prototype, but they realised it needed developing into a motorcycle that would be economical to produce and own, as well as reliable in use. So the 4-valve alloy head was replaced by an unusual 2-valve arrangement in cast iron which featured an inlet sidevalve almost facing an overhead exhaust valve. The idea of combining an overhead valve with a sidevalve was not unique, but everyone else who adopted the idea placed the inlet valve above the piston and the exhaust valve to the side. The reasoning was simple: the inlet charge gains

most from the easier route into the cylinder since, unlike exhaust gases, it is not propelled by the force of combustion. But Carlo Guzzi was more concerned with keeping the exhaust valve in the cooling airflow, since this is the hottest part of a four-stroke engine and a part prone to failing. So his engine had the exhaust valve above the piston and the inlet valve to the side, and anyway the horizontal single could not really have a carburettor in front of its cylinder head.

Constrained by an inlet sidevalve fed by the Amac one inch carburettor, and despite raising the compression ratio to 4:1, the revised engine gave 8bhp. Dimensions, notably bore, stoke and capacity, were largely unchanged from the prototype, as was the chassis. The production-ready motorcycle was called the Moto Guzzi Normale (“Standard Guzzi Motorcycle”) and weighing in at a modest 130kg (286lbs) it could achieve 85km/h (53mph). But perhaps the most striking thing about this new motorcycle was how different it looked to everything else on the market, as if to emphasise that Moto Guzzi was a new company that would tread its own path regardless of fashion or received wisdom. Certainly painting the motorcycle a rather drab green-brown seemed perverse, but then building a factory in a small fishing village rather than following the herd south to Milan was just the start of Moto Guzzi’s reputation for doing things its own way.

opposite: Guzzis seem to inspire artists – painting of Swiss Dondo racer Aurelio Galfetti (bottom) is by Giampietro Iseppi (gigarte.com) “Our” Dondolino is from 1946, the first year of production

In 1934 Moto Guzzi launched the 500V which in layout and appearance seemed like a marginally improved Normale. In fact the 500V was a complete redesign that brought in a true overhead valve cylinder head and a four-speed foot change gearbox. Power was 18bhp, so things were getting better, just not very quickly. The S and GTS versions of the new engine retained the old inlet-over-exhaust cylinder heads that limited them to 13bhp: even so, they outsold the ohv 500V (and the rear-suspended version of the V, the GTV) by two-to-one. It might seem astonishing so little progress was made in thirteen years, but there’s a clue in the fact the S/GTS survived until war broke out. These were hard times, with global recession, and expansionist policies, that meant the Italian public sector, including the police and military, were about the only people buying motorcycles. Even Mussolini had a Moto Guzzi, after all.

The other reason road bike design was progressing slowly was that racing motorcycles were going down a completely separate development path. In the early 1920s a pair of young Italian engineers, Carlo Gianni and Piero Remor, built a 490cc four cylinder engine which made 28bhp and immediately out-powered Moto Guzzi’s own four-valve, single cylinder, factory racer. By 1928 this four was developing 34bhp, and it would ultimately evolve into the dominant Gilera and MV Agusta four-cylinder racers. Carlo Guzzi was rightly convinced high revving multi-cylinder engines were the future, and he felt his single cylinder racers would be unable to compete, so he designed three- and four-cylinder engines that proved little other than that power without handling meant nothing. Carlo was also mistaken about how quickly the singles would be outpaced, and how long it would take to balance the power of multi-cylinder engines by mastering the mysteries of motorcycle chassis design.

There were also those in motorcycling who had spotted that as racing cars had become more divorced from their road-going counterparts, a lot fewer got sold. While racing success might persuade buyers to step into a particular

manufacturers’ showroom, it was better for business if some of those buyers would actually pay for their own racing machines. Especially when those old fashioned races for gentlemen competitors could attract over a hundred entries, rather than the dozen or so that were becoming worryingly typical at the more famous races.

Race organisers spotted this before the factories, and took to creating what we would now call production racing, although initially this amounted to insisting entries had lights and a stand. But Moto Guzzi were quick to realise that between their prosaic exhaust-over-inlet roadbikes and exotic fourvalve racers there was room for an over-the-counter production racer to sell to those gentlemen racers. The first of these had an overhead valve engine like the 500V, initially christened the Nuova C (for Corsa - “new racer”), and it won the 500cc class on its debut at the 1938 Circuito del Lario. By the time the production racer went on sale the moniker had become GTCL (Gran Turismo Corsa Leggera – colloquially “lightweight racing GT”) and for 1939 it became the Condor. This production model was also much improved over the Nuova C and a world away from the mainstream 500S/GTS. Cast iron heads and barrels were replaced with aluminium alloy, and crankcases were magnesium alloy. Just as importantly the Condor shared the 500V’s four-speed gearbox and with a foot shift, rather than the earlier hand-change, mere mortals might be able to race it. With a 7:1 compression and a monstrous for the time 32mm Dell’Orto carburettor even the customer bikes had a claimed 28bhp.

The Condor’s final flourish was a chassis that owed more to Moto Guzzi’s supercharged 250cc factory racer than any road bike. Magnesium alloy brakes and aluminium rims kept weight down to just 140kg (barely more than 300lbs) even in full road trim. Here was a motorcycle that could beat the supercharged Gilera four on the track, win the 1940 MilanoTaranto, and yet was also flexible enough to be used as a police motorcycle. The only real challenge came from the new Gilera Saturno in 1940, but then racing came to an abrupt end

as war burned through Europe. Just 69 Condors had been built when Moto Guzzi ended production and switched to building products more attuned to the needs of a country caught up in a bloody conflict.

Eventually the gentle beauty of peace returned and the people of Europe were treated to a very different way of life, free from pre-war regimes. Talk was of rebuilding and rationing, of making do and mending, of compromises and community. To these ends there was also an immediate ban on supercharged racing motorcycles, reflecting the reality of lower quality fuel. Carlo Guzzi stopped worrying about Gilera’s supercharged four-cylinder racer and started worrying about their 500cc single instead. Carlo set to developing the Condor into a Gilera Saturno beater. This was to be dubbed the Dondolino (“rocking chair”), some say reflecting the slightly suspect handling even though it seems odd that Moto Guzzi would abandon their habit of naming motorcycles after birds and switch to using less-than flattering nicknames. So there are those who wonder if the Dondolino name was simply reflecting Norton’s labelling of their racing frames as “Featherbed”. Whatever the reason, Moto Guzzi had a distinct advantage in the shape of Italy’s youngest and brightest graduate engineer, who had joined them in 1936, the brilliant Giuliano Cesare Carcano. From 1947 he would run the Moto Guzzi racing department and become most famous as the designer of Moto Guzzi’s V8 Grand Prix racer. But first things first.

The post-war economic climate ruled out a major redesign, so instead the 1946 Dondolino amounted to a much-improved Condor featuring a number of magnificent detail changes. The obvious visual difference is the aerodynamic rear mudguard which replaced the Condor’s more conventional fitment, yet so many Condors were upgraded by adding Dondolino components that it is far from a certain guide. Perhaps the most telling sign of Carcano’s attention to detail is the beautiful magnesium alloy 260mm front brake, with internal levers to gain a tiny aerodynamic advantage. Every little helps isn’t just an advertising strapline. Carcano’s famed obsession with saving weight is highly evident on the Dondolino with, as on the Condor, crankcases among the many components cast from magnesium alloy. In passing, it’s worth noting that

although magnesium alloy is often called Elektron, that name is a trademark of the German company that developed magnesium alloys for aircraft use in WWI. They didn’t make parts for Moto Guzzi.

In many respects the Dondolino shared much with Carlo Guzzi’s original Normale, although tuned and improved by over twenty years of racing. Certainly many dimensions remained the same, notably bore and stroke, although compression was now up from even the Condor’s 7:1 to 8.5:1, perhaps surprising given the quality of post-war petrol. The Dell’Orto SSM carburettor was also bigger than the Condor’s at 35mm. The chassis however was much the same, although with a single spring (as opposed to the Condor’s pair) for the rear suspension, hidden in a box under the engine. Dondolinos were assembled in small batches by the race department, individual bikes inevitably have minor differences from their namesakes. Coupled with the upgrading of racing Condors to Dondolino specification, telling them apart today is an expert’s job. With 33bhp propelling just 128kg in race trim, they were also an expert’s racing motorcycle, and immediately competitive against all-comers.

As soon as Gilera got wind of the Dondolino they released a 35bhp Sanremo version of their Saturno. Even so, a Dondo finished second to a Saturno in the 1946 Circuito del Lario, and then won the Spanish Grand Prix. Building on that success the Dondolino won the European motorcycle championship (second division - possibly meaning for production models). But the rugged Dondolino’s real strength was in road racing, and especially the gruelling Milano-Taranto. Either an upgraded Condor or a Dondolino won that race every year from 1950 to 1953, often in style: in 1951 Moto Guzzi took six of the first seven places, split only by the fifth placed MV Agusta 500/4 racebike - with lights! In 1955 Gilera tried the same trick, running two riders, Bruno Francisci and Orlando Vadinoci, on 500/4s to secure victory for Francisci. But by then a 500 single with its roots in 1921 needed a major redesign to remain competitive. Just 54 Dondolinos were built between 1946 and 1951, retailing at double the price of its more prosaic GTV/GTW Guzzi siblings, but the achievement of those few bikes proved that they were worth every lira.

benzina

Lucky MAN

t h E f E at U r E d dondol I no BE lon GS to a man WI th a SE r I al G U zz I SI n G l E ha BI t.

G ordon d E la mar E conf ESSES all

he Guzzi single bug first bit back in 1967 on a motorcycle trip to Italy when, riding to a camp site in Rimini, we were joined by a couple of Caribinieri riding Falcones. These were different to anything I’d seen before with a character all of their own. “Must get one of those, one day” was the thought that crossed my mind. In fact I eventually got into Guzzis with a Le Mans II, and that had to wait until 1984. It was 1995 before I managed to find a Falcone, buying one registered in the UK in 1980 but hardly used since.

Once you start on the Guzzi singles “train” you soon get sucked into looking out for any others that might be hanging around. Especially any others that might be for sale. I tasked myself with getting an Ercole, the three-wheeled truck that pretty much rebuilt Italy after WWII, with its ability to get down the narrow streets of old cities. And then there was what many consider to be the ultimate of the singles era: the Dondolino, aka the gentleman’s racer. But both these would take time to find. By this point I had joined the Moto Guzzi Classics Club of Schio (near Vicenza), and ridden a couple of holiday tours with them, so asked the club’s president if he knew of any genuine Dondolinos for sale. I was clear on the “genuine” part because although the factory only built

57 there are probably more than that around today.

And so, in March 2004, I was in Schio and on the hunt only to find not one, but two, genuine Dondolinos. One had just come back from Argentina (amazingly with a frame number differing by only one digit from the Dondolino in Sammy Miller’s Museum) but in a very poor state. The other was owned by a gentleman who raced vintage Ferraris and was in very good condition, as well as holding ASI (Automotoclub Storico Italiano) documentation, validating it as genuine. The records showed it had been built at the end of 1946 and then sold by a dealer in Milan. Later, as was common with racing machines, the engine was replaced with a 1951 Faenza version of the Dondolino engine with strengthened crankshaft bearings and also with Gambalunga valve gear to improve its competitiveness. The big challenge was affording it: these things were - and are now even more so - expensive bikes. It might have been an easier decision if I hadn’t stumbled upon an Ercole the following day, owned by a local museum. That was an easier, and significantly less costly, decision with a deal being done there and then.

Three weeks later a massive pantechnicon came to visit, with the Ercole in the back. It was only then it became obvious that this thing is the size of a small car. Another couple of weeks passed, monies were transferred, and the Dondolino too

showed up. Same truck, same driver, and then there was this wonderful old racing machine leaning against my garage doors. It might have only been about seven in the morning, but next came the challenge of starting. No kickstart, which meant bumping it down the road, and wooah; is this thing loud.

I managed to get a few demonstration runs in with the Dunsfold Aerodrome’s Wings and Wheel event before I was fortunate enough to be accepted as a participant in the 2005 TT Parade. Sadly the Dondolino didn’t get very far on race day, merely the end of the grandstand. The flywheel decided to shear off its locating key before leaving the bike. The engine started to run a bit erratically and then I saw the flywheel on the opposite side of the road – the joy of a backward running engine means that Guzzi flywheels overtake you if they come off, so at least you know what’s going on. It still bears the scars of this today – we call it patina! The good news was that I did get a much treasured TT medal. The flywheel required a significant amount of work, including a new cone, which was made for me by 1950s Guzzi racer Trevor Barnes who by then ran his own engineering company.

The big problem with the Dondolino is that it is loud – very loud. I measured the exhaust noise at 125dB using an environmental heath inspector’s meter and concluded that it isn’t going to get many outings in the UK. I rode it in the post-TT

benzina

races at the Southern 100 Circuit on the Isle of Man in 2007 and also at the Cholomondeley Pageant of Power in 2012. Yes, I know that it can be fitted with a silencer but frankly why should it be physically degraded? I’ll just use it where it is tolerated so that people can experience a true 1940s racing machine. Anyway, the Dondolino and Ercole represent just two Guzzi singles, which is hardly a “train”. So what came next?

Early one Saturday morning in 2007 I had a phone call from a friend who had just seen a mechanically sound Falcone Sport at a jumble in Vicenza. He needed a quick decision. So that was my Falcone Sport. Actually, my second Falcone Sport. The train was coming along nicely. I modified this one with a “comfort” seat for my wife who likes to ride pillion for the Moto Guzzi Classics Club annual tour. After suffering a 1,000 mile week perched on my first Falcone Sport’s pillion I decided she deserved better. Seat number two might not look as pretty as the original but it does make riding pillion on the Falcones less painful.

And they do get ridden. In total they have been on some six tours around Italy as well as to the Isle of Man, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. All this in the company of as many as 24 other Falcones. We both look forward to more such trips.

The final (theoretically!) Guzzi single I acquired is an ultra-rare 1938 GTC/Leggera (GTC “light” – as in lightweight - only weighing 129kg/285lbs with lights: a single kg more than a similarly specced Dondolino and far less than a standard GTC’s 160kg/350lbs). I first came across the bike during the 75th Moto Guzzi anniversary weekend at the Mandello del Lario factory in 1996. It had a great history. Built in 1938, before returning to the factory in 1939, it was rebuilt in Condor form and shipped to Addis Ababa in Abyssinia. This was then part of the Italian empire, so the bike went straight to the local Moto Guzzi distributor where it was appropriated by a captain in the Indian Army. After WWII he had the GTC/L shipped back to India and sold it to a Maharaja. Forty years later, a Brit on assignment spotted it being ridden round a local market, and in short order was the proud new owner. To avoid the cost and difficulties involved in exporting a complete motorcycle he simply dismantled the GTC and, like the Cadillac in Johnny Cash’s “One Piece at a Time”, the Guzzi left India in suitcases. By 1993 everything was back in the UK and in one piece again. I do ride the GTC/L around the local roads as well as in classic events where it gets quite a bit of attention. The main challenge is that being so original it has no speedometer despite being capable of 105 mph, so some caution is needed. At least when asked “Do you know how fast you were going, sir?” I can honestly answer that I simply don’t have a clue. B

Ivar’sarchives

Ivar

The German Grand Prix of 1969. Australian Jack Findlay is warming his Linto 500, although there is still some time before the race will start. The Linto was an interesting machine, built by an Italian radiotechnic engineer, Cattolica born Lino Tonti. His love affair with motorcycles began in 1937 when he joined Benelli, working with Giuseppe Benelli on the 250cc four, concentrating on areas like the ignition system. But it was after WWII when Lino mastered the full range of motorcycle engineering skills, alongside friends who were converting decommissioned military Triumph 350 singles into road bikes. Initially he focused on the electrics, but as time passed he started experimenting with the engines, selling uprated motorcycles for racing. These machines enjoyed success in the hands of Italian privateers, and although Lino soon established a company to build motorcycles, (ORIM, co-founded with his uncle), he is remembered mostly for his work with names like Aermacchi, Bianchi, Moto Guzzi and Paton.

As an independent manufacturer, Lino’s creations are best known by the Linto name, a contraction of Lino Tonti. Under that banner he would offer tuned versions of other manufacturers’ motorcycles, although it often went further then that. Take Aermacchi for example, one of his employers in the 1950s: the relationship between Aermacchi and Linto was pretty much the same as between Ducati and NCR in the 1970s. Aermacchi’s works machines, mainly entered in enduros in the factory’s early years, often had riders wearing Linto sweaters. Today this can lead to confusion: was the motorcycle a Linto or an Aermacchi? When I asked Lino about the subject he simply said “The answer is both”. That is how close the relationship between Linto and Aermacchi was.

In Grand Prix racing Lino is perhaps best known for his Linto 500. Often called a “double Aermacchi 250”, because so many parts from the Varese firm’s 250 Ala d’Oro production racer were used. Lino started the project in 1966, initially intending no connection with Aermacchi whatsoever. He wanted to build a twin-cylinder 500cc GP racer with double overhead camshafts and four radial valves per cylinder. After some initial sketches he realised the project would not be economically viable. Instead he decided to build an engine using existing parts from the Aermacchi-HD 250 Ala d’Oro. An excellent idea, but not enough to make a success of the Linto, with development faltering due to the demands of his new employers. In 1967 he joined Moto Guzzi, which slowed Linto 500 development down to a crawl. Still, he continued, thanks to people like his assistant, Alcide Biotti and former racer Umberto Premoli, who helped with funding.

1969 was the most successful year for the Linto on track. Lino offered Jack Findlay a Linto 500 in a sponsorship deal.

Along with Nello Pagani and Swiss rider Guyla Marsovszky, Findlay made up the trio of riders most associated with the Linto 500. In just the second race of the season, the German Grand Prix at the ultra fast Hockenheim circuit, Findlay surprised the competition by finishing third, only beaten by Agostini’s MV and German Hockenheim expert Karl Heinz Hoppe on a Metisse. Up until that point the Linto’s success was largely attributed to Pagani’s expertise, but Findlay showed there was more to the motorcycle than that. Many years after Findlay’s rostrum finish Tonti told me that the German GP was an eye-opener for many, proving that a Linto could be a genuine alternative to a works ride, with the potential to be up there with the best regardless of who was riding it. In Lino’s eyes Findlay’s success so early in the season not only gained the Linto recognition but also made him dream of how far the project could actually go. Quite far, in fact, as Marsovszky was to prove when he went on to finish the 1969 season as runner-up in the world championship. Not only that, Alberto Pagani also won the Italian Grand Prix of 1969 on Tonti’s twin. With 66bhp at 10,000 rpm the Linto delivered more power then the 500cc singles, even if it was not enough to match the 83bhp of the MV Agusta that Agostini was riding.

So how did Pagani win that Italian GP, the only GP win for a Linto, against the mighty MV? Simply because Count Agusta was upset. Imola had been chosen as the circuit for the Italian GP, a decision not accepted by Count Agusta who insisted that Monza should be used as it was close to the MV factory and used by them as a test track. It was also very handy for him personally, as the circuit ran around Monza Park where Count Agusta owned a house, literally a stone’s throw from the circuit’s tarmac. To make the FIM rethink their ruling the Count withdrew his entry, but to no avail, and the rest is history: a GP win for a Linto! But for Lino Tonti, the third place in Germany always held a special place in his heart. And for Findlay? In the 1980s he asked us for some photographs and amongst the ones he wanted was the one seen here. During a trip just after the 24 Hours of Le Mans I stopped in Vaucresson, near Paris, to drop them off. At the time he was still working for French tyre manufacturer Michelin, giving much needed aid with road tyre development. While enjoying his usual magnificent hospitality I asked him if he remembered what he was thinking when the photograph was taken. With a smile, he said “Oh yes, do I remember! I was asking myself whether it was worth riding such a dangerously unreliable bike!” He must have meant it as, despite the free use of the Linto, he opted mid-season to ride a G50 Matchless-powered Seeley instead.

Linto never again achieved the heights they had reached in1969, and in 1970 the Italian Grand Prix returned to Monza to be won by Agostini on an MV Agusta. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

opposite: as well as Findlay’s podium in the 1969 German GP, other Lintos were sixth, 11th, 14th and 36th. By the end of the season Linto would be second in the constructors’ championship, ahead of Norton.

de Gier recalls conversations with Lino Tonti, Jack Findlay, and helping Fabio Taglioni tease Count Agusta that his Gallarate“Fire Engines” could be beaten

Lino Tonti might be most associated with Moto Guzzi, his V7 Sport frame being adopted across the V-twin range to become so ubiquitous that Guzzis of the era are often called “Tonti-framed”. But he designed far more than just frames, including Grand Prix twins for both Bianchi and his own Linto

Ducati 500GP

Arnaldo Milvio and Fredmano Spairani amounted to Ducati’s top management in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Milvio as a director and Spairani as general manager. Both were racing enthusiasts, so it should be no surprise when, at a board meeting in October 1970, they were the driving force behind the decision for Ducati to return to racing. Enthusiasts have a lot to thank these two men for as it was they who encouraged Fabio Taglioni to develop a 750 twin. Taglioni, inspired by Moto Guzzi’s Bicilindrica 500, basically doubled up the Ducati single configuration to create the first Ducati V-twin, a 750. And then Milvio and Spairani provided the budget for the new Ducati to go racing. Today we should remember what that October 1970 board meeting has given us: Ducati’s V-twin became legendary, especially for accumulating World Superbike championships, and we can recall fondly what was achieved before that in long distance races across the world. And of course the 750’s achievement at the Imola 200 of April 23, 1972 is perhaps the most famous win Ducati ever achieved.

But the October 1970 decision led to more. To be precise, the board declared an intention to develop a 500cc Grand Prix bike and, even better, ten were to be built. What followed was a minor miracle as Fabio Taglioni produced a running racing motorcycle, from a blank sheet of paper, in a little under six months. This first bike had a frame designed at Ducati, although an order had already been placed with frame specialist Colin Seeley to construct an alternative. The first version of the 500GP’s engine delivered 61.2bhp at 11,000 rpm and featured two desmodromic operated valves per cylinder, following the general layout of the 750. Ducati carefully managed expectations, releasing a statement when introducing the new 500 warning they did not expect to win races, but rather to provide support and promotion for the 750especially in terms of reliability. During 1971 and 1972 the 500 GP was raced with moderate success by riders of the calibre of Ermanno Giuliano, Phil Read and Bruno Spaggiari. However, the new Ducati 500GP was no match for Agostini and his MV Agusta triple with 25bhp more then the Ducati.

This was our first photograph of the new 500 twin in action, taken at Pesaro in 1971. Bruno Spaggiari always was a factor to be reckoned with and here we see why - he is seen leading Giacomo Agostini on the MV Agusta factory triple. What a promising sight this was! But it wasn’t meant to be. Spaggiari retired from the race, as did his team-mate Giuliano. And, of course, Agostini won.

But this image shows the mighty world championship winning MV triple behind a desmodromic Ducati V-twin - and it is one of very few images like that. A few months after the race we visited the Ducati factory and Dr. T. laughed out loud when he saw the image. He asked if we could have it processed as a large poster-sized photo to send it to MV. Of course we did as he asked and shipped the picture over to Bologna. Months later we were at Ferrari delivering some Formula 1 racing images and in the lobby we ran into Taglioni again. At times he would come over and consult Ferrari’s engineering department. This was not an uncommon arrangement, and still happens today, between Italian development engineers working for the major factories. When we asked after the poster he said, with a big grin, that he had it handdelivered to Gallarate with a note to the Count reading “Greetings from Bologna!” B

The Ducati 500GP’s 74mmx58mm bore and stroke reappeared on the Pantah, as did toothed rubber camshaft belts and a two-valve desmodromic head. Incredible that so many features of a Grand Prix engine would find themselves on a road bike so quickly, and that by 2003 they were considered features suitable for a touring motorcycle like the original Multistrada

Greetings from Bologna

Puglia

out on a limb with ducati’s multistrada

Words: Alan Cathcart Photos: Kyoichi Nakamura

italy’s one of the longest countries in Europe, shaped like one of the thigh-length high-heeled boots a sexy signorina might wear, measuring 800miles/1300km from never-neverland to the tip of its toe. Puglia is its heel, a south-eastern corner noted mainly for the Brindisi ferry to Greece and beyond. Until recently this was one of the poorest and most isolated regions of the Mezzogiorno (“half day”), the name given by northerners to the Italy south of Rome where the locals are reputed to work for only for half the day. Whether this is because of heat, laziness or lack of jobs is not entirely clear. Maybe all three.

Italy’s geographical divide means its richest, more prosperous natives live up north, with income levels falling steeply the further south you head - and as befits its “heel” nickname, Puglia’s out on a limb. It’s the end of the line, and that’s one of its appeals for today’s visitors. The once dirt-poor region’s recent prosperity, thanks to exploitation of its fertile, central plain for agriculture, is still less touristy and more authentic than the cultural hotspots further north. Puglia, for now at least, retains a traditional, very idiosyncratic, character. There’s nowhere else quite like it, as a sixday trip with a Ducati Multistrada proved.

The seaport of Bari is Puglia’s HQ, and Italy’s seventh largest city, providing a good kickoff point for a 600-mile/1000km tour of the region which began rather unpromisingly. How so? Well, I’ve been visiting Italy for more than forty years, and have driven hundreds of thousands of miles there – yet by never going further south on the mainland than Naples had never experienced the dreadful pugliese driving standards. Expect the worst, ride defensively, and you’ll be OK - but Mezzogiorno motorists are quite unconcerned about little things like right of way. Or even red lights.

Don’t let that put you off though, because away from the cities traffic is very light and the roads are mostly excellent thanks to EU funded improvement. Instead, my next concern was on arrival at the World Heritage Site of Matera. This city consists of hundreds of caves, or sassi, hewn out in tiers along two sides of a deep limestone ravine, offering protection against both elements and enemies. So your ultra-secure home bored into the cliff has only a conventional facade - no need to worry about the roof tiles cracking - but could be halfway up a rockface, reached by steps carved in the rock. The family-run Hotel Sassi was built like this, with rooms overlooking the town, and the Ducati’s good ground clearance meant I could yump it up several flights of stairs, to park just a couple of levels from the front door of the hotel. Gives a new meaning to the name ‘Multistrada’, and sure beats walking up carrying your bags!

Walking round Matera at night is like stepping back into medieval times. Apart from streetlights nothing much has changed here for half a millennium, and dogs barking at the sunset still counterpoint the church bells tolling for evening mass. Dining out that night (for a fraction of the cost of a restaurant 500 miles further north) in the Ristorante Il Terrazzo was a magical experience. Sitting outside, under the stars and watching history come alive, provided a wonderful vista of the sprawling, softly-lit sassi. This was also a fine introduction to pugliese cuisine, designed as fuel for a day in the fields. Worthy rather than exceptional, yet who can beat good country cooking done right?

Paradiso indeed; Feels like Heaven. above: Even Ostuni policewomen are glamorous: The “Half Day” nickname clearly wasn’t taken as an insult; they even have their own newspaper La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno

As befits the region producing 80% of Europe’s pasta, more olive oil than the rest of Italy combined, and most of Italy’s fish as well as plenty of its green vegetables and fruit, the food in Puglia is hearty and wholesome. Pugliesi eat lamb or kid spitroasted over herb-scented fires, preceded by distinctive earshaped orechiette pasta garnished al ragù with a rich meat sauce. Or even with turnip tops, cime di rapa. Cheeses are a strong point, especially ricotta and mozzarella, but also burata and the hard pecorino, best accompanied by the local vino. Until recently Pugliese wine was pretty basic - most was shipped to Turin for use in vermouths like Martini - but thanks to modern technology there’s been a huge improvement.

“We’ve learnt to reduce yields and to pick the grapes at precisely the right moment,” tells Rocco Vincenti, president of the local Cantina Sociale co-operative, covering a 40 km² territory in the heart of the Salentino wine district. “This has allowed us to concentrate on quality, and Pugliese wine is now recognized for its worth, but at reasonable cost.” And for the hair on its chest, too - the San Donaci Anticaia red is a muscular 14%abv, made from the same Primitivo grape as California’s trademark Zinfandel. Too many glasses of that and I might have had trouble riding the Multistrada downstairs the next day!

But in the morning, having successfully negotiated that obstacle after a breakfast of home-made pastries and

cappuccino, it was time to visit the local market. With most locals buying their food daily at markets local farmers continue to prosper. Take care riding over the flagstones lining Matera’s streets, though, seeming like highly polished black ice even in the heat of June: in the wet you might be better off walking. A brief stop at the spectacular Madonna de Idris church perching above the sassi, hewn from solid rock and lined with 14thcentury frescoes, and then it was time to point the Ducati south-east to Taranto. This naval port was known to Romans as the source of the purple dye, created from decayed shellfish, which adorned a Roman emperor’s toga. More recently, until 1956 it was the finish of the most gruelling, most historic openroads motorcycle race in Europe, the Milano-Taranto. Trying to recreate the run to the old finish line proved impossible thanks to Taranto’s one-way system - not that that seemed to worry the locals - and sadly there’s not even a memorial to the race.

Heading towards Italy’s easternmost point at Otranto, after a great fish lunch at Ristorante Ebalia, meant passing the giant Nardo test track, a perfect 2 km circle with 12.65 km of banking that allows high-speed testing on secret prototypes. Which is why they wouldn’t let me in to see what was producing the great howling you could hear from outside! MV Agusta’s F4 312 was trapped at 195mph/312km/h here in homologation tests (hence the 312 suffix) and a Koenigsegg coupé clocked 242mph/387km/h. Not slow.

The tiny walled seaside city of Otranto has streets paved with smoothed-off cobblestones, keeping the Ducati’s Pirelli Diablos scrabbling for grip, and whitewashed houses that give it a very Greek feel. That’s not surprising since it’s Italy’s closest point to Greece, although the distant mountains you see across the Ionian Sea belong to Albania, making this historically a haven for refugees. Otranto is still a key target for illegal immigrants, although the boats intercepted by the coastguard are now more likely to be packed with Kurds and Iraqis than Kosovans and Albanians. In an eerie preview of recent history during July 1480 the city was captured by the Turkish fleet after a 15-day siege, massacring 12,000 people, then beheading he 800 survivors who refused to convert to Islam. A memorial with the names of the slaughtered lies inside the magnificently restored 800-year old castle.

Today Otranto is a relaxed place to stay for a couple of days, and the Hotel Valle dell’Idro, up on a hill just outside the town, is cool and convenient with breakfast served on a flowerbedecked patio. Riding further down the rugged coast road lined with ruined watchtowers not only leads to some fine biking roads, zig-zagging through tobacco plantations and in and out of pretty coves and cliffs, but also signs to timewarp towns with improbable names like Paradiso and Gallipoli: not the WWI battlefield, by the way, which is in Turkey. Along the way I saw a sign for Tiziana Romano’s cheese farm at Torre San Emiliano which, after 3 km of strade bianche (white dirt roads) that made me glad to be Multistrada-mounted, turned out to be the home of a herd of 900 goats producing soft ricotta and hard pecorino cheese. The latter is aged for up to a year in refrigerated larders to produce a strong, nutty flavour in contrast to the creaminess of the ricotta.

“We start work at 5am each morning to make the cheese early, while it’s still cool,” says Tiziana while showing me around, “and we only sell in Puglia, because we eat a lot of cheese here. There’s a big demand for a high-quality product like ours that isn’t made in a factory. We milk the goats twice a day and they live outdoors all year round - it’s really mild here in winter.” June’s a good time to visit Puglia, by the way - I had balmy 80ºF/28ºC weather all week, and it rained for just once and then only for five minutes.

Back in Otranto, an evening walk uncovered an unlikely

jewel in the row of shops selling tourist tat. Hiroko Nagase is a Japanese-born woman who studied fine arts in the USA, then moved to Italy and married the maths professor at nearby Lecce University. Today, she produces an array of handmade ceramic items of great beauty, which she sells in her shop at reasonable cost, as well as dabbling in the Lecce speciality of papier-mâché. She’s also become an astute observer of Balkan human affairs: “I like Italians the best,” she states. “They are very warm and happy people, even when they are poor and life is hard, always finding something good to get pleasure from, especially making beautiful things with their hands out of humble materials like wood or stone. Greek people are not so happy - they seem always on the defensive and not so smiling, but that’s because they were attacked by so many other nations over the centuries. Other Balkan people who used to belong to the old Yugoslavia are still trying to adjust to the ways of western Europe, so they seem always ready to attack you, just like they did each other - I think your word is “belligerent", isn’t it?”

Next day, riding to Lecce, I remembered Hiroko-san’s words about humble pleasures when I stopped to visit Rocco Schifano’s masonry workshop along the way. Here he carves stone mantelpieces and table legs (for surmounting with a glass top) for a living, practicing sculpture as the hobby he sometimes gets paid for. Lecce’s local sandstone comes in three grades, he advises. “The softest is like butter, which I don’t like working with - there’s no consistency. The hardest one is like granite, very hard to chisel and takes a long time to work, though it’s very durable. The medium kind is best to work with, but it’s better to do so when it’s freshly quarried - it gets harder with age. You’ll see that in Lecce when you get there - there’s lots of beautiful Baroque masonry work from 300 years ago that has weathered really well.”

But before Lecce I needed fuel as well as lunch-on-the-go from the adjacent truck stop. A soft roll bristling with rosemary was filled with mortadella sausage, fresh (not aged) pecorino cheese, and tuna. A great, if unlikely, combo. Puglia has the best bread in Italy, much tastier than the hard, dry stuff that predominates further north, and it offers plenty of variety. Never the same twice, and ranging from the hard-crusted, soft-centred yellow corn bread of Matera which tastes more like cake, to more rustic but still tasty fare further east, sometimes unleavened and/or laced with onions and olives.

left: approaching Ostuni above: sculptor Rocco seems defensive, but then that bust’s not a great likeness of Alan

benzina

Lecce is the biggest town in Puglia proper but, with just 70,000 people, still quaint and friendly. Dubbed the ‘Florence of the South’, its compact old town is pervaded by opulent churches and flowery Baroque palazzi built in the sunny local sandstone. The decorative masonry might have been concocted by mad pastry chefs, voluptuous mermaids vying with carefree caryatids to support intricate balconies. Elsewhere luxuriant urns and floral pinnacles contrast with a lone shewolf skulking beneath a tree, and adjacent nymphs blow their trumpets at the sky. Simply Hollywood by stonemasonry standards, this looney tune lavishness made a couple of hours in Lecce time well spent. The hub of the old town is the Piazza Sant’Oronzo, one-third taken up by a Roman amphitheatre discovered in 1936 while installing a new water main. Capable of holding up to 20,000 people, it’s used for concerts and plays, although sadly not during this visit. Instead, I strolled into the vast Piazza Duomo, a 17th-century cathedral adjoined by a massive five-story campanile (bell-tower) reaching 70m/236ft into the sky, and discovered that this is a favourite place for freshly-married couples to have their photo taken - even if they got wed elsewhere. Four wedding parties came and went while I looked around, although I didn’t see a funeral…

I couldn’t leave Lecce without visiting one of the cartapesta (papier-mâché) workshops Hiroko Nagase had said to track down, a speciality of the city dating back 400 years. Only the faces and hands of the predominantly religious figurines are moulded in clay, and the cartapesta (made from paper, flour and water) is shaped to model their bodies and flowing robes.

“It almost died away completely thirty years ago,” said Rosaria Pallara, deftly dabbing a paintbrush at a figure of St. Francis of Assisi so perfectly modelled you’d swear it was made in porcelain or wax “But then it became popular again, mainly as a hobby at first, and now it’s flourishing, especially for younger

people – I have many students working part-time for me in my workshops.” I’d have bought one of the life-size figures of small birds Rosaria also makes but didn’t fancy its chances of surviving the trip in the tankbag. Pity.

After a morning riding across generally underwhelming countryside - flat, fertile, but rather boring – it was time to head off to the hills, aiming for trulli territory on the hilly central spine southeast of Bari. Trulli are hobbit-like homes, small, cylindrical limestone buildings assembled without mortar, usually whitewashed, under a grey, conical roof of limestone tiles. They are a landmark in the area people usually mean when they claim Puglia to be ‘the new Tuscany’. It’s nothing of the kind, of course, and doesn’t need to be, because it has its own distinctive character, typified by the trullo. Many have been taken over by tourists as second homes, although some opt to move to Puglia full time after falling in love with the region. But there are still lots of locals living here, such as the Convertini family with their 12-trulli home, amidst the grove of olive trees which provide their income.

“All trulli have just a single room,” explained forty-something Donato Convertini, who turned out to be a well-travelled marathon runner between olive harvests, having run a total of 14 races in under three and a half hours, including the New York Marathon, London twice, Berlin and of course Rome. “But the bigger the room, the taller you must build the roof, to have a sound structure. Our first one was built about 200 years ago, but the advantage of trulli is that, when you need more space, you simply build a new one next door, and knock through the wall to join them up. Plus the walls are up to a metre thick to support the roof, so they’re very well insulated - cool in summer and warm in winter. We could afford to move to a modern house if we wanted to, but it wouldn’t be as comfortable and practical as these are.”

benzina

In nearby Alberobello the trulli have got themselves organised and taken over half the town. Wandering round the winding streets, local families are still in evidence alongside foreigners and the inevitable tourist shops. You can stay in one of these hobbit homes, although the hotels that claim them as rooms are best avoided on grounds of price and authenticity. My trullo for a couple of nights was on a hill outside the little town of Cisternino. Actually, two trulli, because the German lady and her Italian boyfriend who owned the B&B had built another smaller one to house an en-suite bathroom, and in best Puglian practice, had simply knocked them together.

Exploring the surrounding countryside aboard the Ducati in the warm June sunshine was lots of fun, especially along the tight, twisty, hillside roads that predominate here, in contrast to the flatlands north of Nardo, where I’d logged a 23mile/37kms without a single curve. No, that’s not a misprint – they’re Roman roads, explaining the 20,000-seat grandstand in Lecce. Some of the hill towns are really worth exploring, even if the much-touted whitesplashed Ostuni was a letdown, with tourism overrunning the rather dishevelled centre. Much nicer and more authentic was Martina Franca, a Spanish-style place where you can only just walk through passages made as narrow as possible to fend off the baking summer heat. However, the modern suburb lower down the hill contained some surprises, including a Triumph motorcycle dealership and what seemed like a retirement ranch for old Fiat 500s. Just as you click up the ks in Mexico by counting VW Beetles, here I must have seen more than two dozen of the original Cinqs in half an hour - there must be a local specialist who keeps them going.

More numerous than the vineyards and fruit trees in Puglia are the olive groves, but visiting out of season (the crop’s harvested from late October to early January), there didn’t seem much chance of seeing how Puglia’s biggest cash crop gets created. That was before visiting Vincenzo Iaia, whose Azienda Villa Agreste near Ostuni is one of the largest and most historic Pugliese olive oil producers. Whilst giving the impression of a Latin playboy on first encounter, Iaia is a warm, committed professional who insisted on spending two hours showing off his idyllic estate, including the 500 year-old frantoio (mill press). There are grooves in the stone floor worn by generations of mules turning the press clockwise for nine months a year. They needed resting every hour or sometimes led counter-clockwise round a dummy press, to reprogramme their minds into turning right as well as left. Olive harvests were much longer then, according to Iaia, until producers realised the importance of crushing the fruit when it’s at its juiciest - apparently black olives are simply green ones that have been left on the tree

to age. “Most olive oil is Extra Vergine, which means it’s carefully harvested and produced - but it has three enemies,” he pronounced. “Heat, light, and time. Temperature in this frantoio is remarkably constant - it’s 24 degrees all year round, and you must never let oil exceed 28 degrees, else it loses its flavour, so the worst thing you can do is put it next to a stove. Light causes it to degrade quickly too, so all our bottles are dark glass, and time is the biggest enemy of all - we pick, crush and bottle our oil the same day, and the best sizes to buy and use are always the smallest bottles, because once you break the seal and expose the oil to oxygen, it loses more flavour each day after that.” The Villa Agreste’s mill press is a relic in more ways than one, however - olives are no longer pressed to extract the oil, but instead placed in a centrifuge which whips the flesh off the skin and stone, and eventually separates the oil without any residue tannic acid, thus enhancing flavour. I promise I’ll never put olive oil next to the hotplate again!

Too soon the time had come to head home taking the long way back to Bari via Puglia’s oldest and most unlikely historic artefact, a 13th-century octagonal castle at Castel del Monte, built by the German king Frederick II. In a medieval form of lebensraum Frederick annexed southern Italy to his Swabian empire and began building this incredible place in 1240 AD. A high, isolated fortress, it’s been well restored and, while resembling a giant grain silo from afar, it’s an impressive if

monstrous structure which seems to have had no purpose other than as a giant hunting-lodge.

The final ride through the rolling, deserted countryside underlined the basic appeal of this remote region - it’s mysterious and spacious, but honest and welcoming, with many tucked-away treats to dig out and explore. Down-at-heel but upstanding, Puglia has suffered many invasions over the centuries - Greeks, Romans, Turks, Germans and Venetians have all rampaged through here. But tourists have yet to launch a serious incursion, and Puglia remains best known to the Italians themselves. They come for its rugged coastline with shimmering seas, silvery-grey groves of olive and almond trees, the endless rows of vines and the whitewashed trulli, as well as its food and wine. Above all else, though, Puglia is best-suited to visiting if you love all things Italian - it’s the place for long lunches, early evening passeggiate (strolls) and leisurely drinks watching the coming and going of fishing boats or tractors. Italy’s heel is far from being well trodden - yet. B

Fancy going? These were Alan’s stops:

Hotel Sassi hotelsassi.it

Cantina Sociale wines cantinasandonaci.it

Hotel Valle dell’Idro otrantohotel.com

Trulli rents trulliland.co.uk

Azienda Villa Agreste olive oil villaagreste.com

Castel del Monte, a 3th-century castle opposite, bottom right: Vincenzo Iaia talks olive oil with Alan. Or maybe he’s challenging him to a duel - what are those sword-like things on the table?

We’ve the same book Alan’s holding to prove he’s at the Milano-Taranto finishing line;

Below: Gnarly old olive and Multistrada... take that anyway you like

Fishmonger offers advice; “Flat fish are best for a slap around the face, but this one is better for throwing.” Or not. Actually the market in Matera. right: Even Alan gets lost,. At least he’s all along the watchtower. above: Pietro Carissoni on a Gilera 500 Sport winning the last-ever Milano-Taranto in 1956. He averaged 106km/h (66mph) for over 12 hours. Photo Porrozzi archive / milanotaranto.it

T he fi RST of T wo S peci A l S in T hi S i SS ue of benzinawo R d S & pho T o S: R o B e RT SM i T h

It may have been the bang on the head. Or meeting Giacomo Agostini. Or the photo of a Magni MV pinned to the wall of his shop. Or even all three. Whichever spurred Jim Bush to build a replica Magni Agusta with a modern MV F4 engine doesn’t matter: the result is a spectacular blending of traditional styling and modern functionality.

The bang on the head came when Bush high-sided his BMW R1200R in New Zealand in 2010, leaving him with four broken ribs and a mild concussion. The bang may have freed up a few neurons, because the dream bike started to take shape soon afterward. So the idea was in place, but it needed a deadline. That came in the form of an invitation to show the putative special at the Quail Motorcycle Gathering in Carmel, California in May 2012.

If the Quail show was the incentive, the opportunity came from eBay, and a love affair. At the Seattle Motorcycle Show in 2004, Bush fell for a MV Agusta F4 750 Brutale. Within a week or so, it was in his garage in White Rock, British Columbia. The affair blossomed and soon produced two offspring: a 1958 MV 125 Tourismo Rapido Extra Lusso (TREL) and an MV Chicco scooter. The TREL secured second place in class at the 2008 Legend of the Motorcycle show in Half Moon Bay California at which Ago was a judge, and The Great Man was kind enough to sign the baby MV’s fuel tank.

Speciale Numero Uno The Faster Fire Engine

The Faster Fire Engine

Period styling influences, modern power levels and… a drum brake. Heroically obsessive attention to detail

Jim enjoys the fruits of his labour. Opposite: with his other MVs

And while the Brutale became Bush’s preferred ride, he hungered for even more power. An eBay search turned up a 910 engine from a crashed Brutale, which was quickly installed in Bush’s own bike, leaving the 750 F4 engine without a home. That created a kind of cognitive dissonance in the Bush brain: a motorcycle engine sitting on the floor without the complementary components and a rolling chassis seemed somehow Just Wrong.

With the photo on the shop wall for inspiration, Bush set to. First he needed to design a frame around the F4 engine’s mounting points. For this, Bush credits input from Michael Moore of EuroSpares in California. Tony Foale's book "Motorcycle Handling and Chassis Design - the Art & Science" was also a useful resource.

First job was to anchor and true the engine in a custom jig to hold it rigidly in place. Then the frame could be constructed around it. Bush chose 1" drawn-on-mandrel 0.063" wall thickness mild steel as the frame material. In researching 4130 chrome-moly tubing, Bush concluded there was no real advantage—weight was not a major issue, and 4130 can become embrittled with welding, leading to breakages. Not good. Bush also had to teach himself TIG welding, which he concluded was the method best suited for strong joints with minimum effect on surrounding areas.

Main frame tubes were bent into shape with a mandrel bender and tack welded into place. With some

adjustments, brackets and gussets, the main elements were in place, including the steering head to which would be fitted Triumph Daytona triple clamps and fully-adjustable 45mm Showa forks. The forks, incidentally, Bush attacked with a zip saw to remove the disc calliper brackets and then turned the sliders down on his lathe, taking off surplus metal to replicate period Cerianis. He then made up new mudguard mounts that are glued in place to avoid any issues with welding distortion.

The swingarm, fabricated from rectangular section steel tubing, went through three iterations before Bush was happy with the strength, weight and rigidity of the finished triangulated and gusseted article. Next came paint. Bush used Endura two-pack polyurethane GM Super Red 71U in his heated and well ventilated paint booth.

So now the triple clamps could be assembled to the frame and the Daytona forks fitted. At the rear, Bush chose Works shocks, which the company kindly customized for him in old-school body-down format. Wheels were built up using a new Grimeca four-leading-shoe drum at the front and a Ducati drum from a 750GT at the rear. The hubs were laced to WM2 (front) and WM5 (rear) 18” Morad alloy rims using spokes from Buchanan, and fitted with Bridgestone BT45 tires in140 section rear and 100 section front. A new sprocket carrier machined from billet completed the cycle parts, and a front mudguard was borrowed from a 1995 Triumph Thunderbird.

It may have been the bang on the heador Agormeeting

Fuel tank and silencers were sourced from Giovanni Magni in Italy, though still had to be extensively reworked. The 1974 MV America tank bottom had to be cut out and reworked to accept the F4’s fuel pump, and the front needed to be re-shaped to fit around the steering head. Bush made his own seat pan from fibreglass on an eBay frame and upholstered, then waterjetted his own MV logos from stainless sheet and polished them to use as trim for the pipes.

The F4 engine’s fuel system required some modification to fit. The stock Brutale has an airbox where the fuel tank should be, with the throttle bodies angled upward. There was no room for this arrangement on the special, so Bush sourced 2” aluminium elbows and modified them to turn the throttle bodies to the horizontal. The intakes use screened velocity stacks, which look really cool!

The fairing is a Magni item which houses a period Aprilia headlight and CEV turn signals. Bush made his own MDF plugs to lay up the fibreglass for the period-style side panels. Adjustable clip-on handlebars from Apex are fitted with Brutale switchgear, and pretty much all the rest of the electrics are transferred from a donor F4. That means the digital dash had to be retained: and while Bush would have preferred traditional instruments, the cost and time involved in reworking the Brutale electrics didn’t seem worthwhile.

Bush points to the many, many hours he spent making up brackets,

lugs, and all the other miscellany needed to fit and finish all of the MV’s componentry. He’s especially proud, though of the omnidirectional ball-mount compensator he designed and made for the front brake cables: the brake lever normally actuates both sides of the TLS drum via a splitter and needs constant adjustment for perfect balance; Bush’s ball unit is selfcompensating. Also worthy of note is the cable-hydraulic clutch. The bar lever pulls a cable connected to a master cylinder under the gas tank, allowing Bush to keep the original handlebar profile.

The finished machine is a people magnet when parked and literally a head turner on the road: the flash of red and silver and the four black pipes cause drivers to give chase to find out what it is—and they’re still baffled. And the sound of the F4 motor breathing through open stacks and blowing out of Magni pipes is hard to describe; but imagine a chainsaw shredding a trumpet full of angry hornets…

Bush now has over 5,000 miles on the MV Special, and reports very few issues: the gearshift linkage needed to be redesigned, and a dyno test revealed that quite a few ponies had gone AWOL from the motor—at least partially the result of losing the airbox and tuned exhaust. Bush has plans to relocate the fuel injectors, which, with more re-mapping should attain his goal of 100hp at the rear wheel. Overall, Bush is delighted with the result:

“What a success—and no, not for sale. Nor will I build you a frame

MV Strada fours

Jim Bush’s MV special is a tribute to the magnificent MV street bikes of the 1970s. All MV fours from this era have their origins in the “fire engine” red eight-valve four-cylinder 500cc GP bikes of the 1952-1966 era— before the advent of the 1967 12-valve, three-cylinder and 1973 16-valve four-cylinder machines.

The imperious yet paranoid Count Domenico always feared that a competitor or a privateer would obtain one of his race bikes, replicate or improve on it, and challenge Agusta on the track. For this reason, he ordered the destruction of all used race bikes; but with the retirement of the otto valvole in 1966, Agusta finally agreed to a street version. The first “strada” would be 600cc with shaft final drive so it could never be competitively raced. And while it retained most of the eight-valve racer’s key features, the 600 added electric start and battery charging courtesy of a Bosch Dynastart under the rear of the engine. The problem: it was butt ugly (sorry, 600 fans), the styling a mashup of traditional, contemporary and custom that Just Didn’t Work.

By 1970, the reluctant Count conceded that what MV fans wanted was a sportsbike; however, he insisted the shaft drive be retained, and the iconic 750S was the result. The extra capacity came from a bore increase to 65mm, while four 24mm Dell’Ortos replaced the 600s two similar instruments, and the 600’s weedy Campagnolo mechanical disc brake was ditched in favour of a 4LS double-drum Grimeca.

But the styling was considerably sportier. The clip-on bars, sleek tank, four-into-four pipes, velocity stacks and humped seat all echoed the eight-valve racer. Power was quoted as 66hp at 8,000rpm. Sadly, the Count died suddenly during 1971, with control of operations passing to his brother Corrado, who had little interest in motorcycles. Regardless, a new model, the 750GT appeared for 1972, essentially a restyled version of the 750S with touring bodywork and handlebars. Almost everything else—even the open intakes (hardly suitable for touring) were retained. It wasn’t a wild success, either.

1974 brought major revisions: a new 750S appeared, distinguished by its dual disc front brake with Scarab callipers. Revised cam timing, larger valves and intake ports, and 27mm Dell’Ortos produced 69hp at 8,500rpm. Now managed by former Ducati boss Fredmano Spairini, MV was persuaded that a large market for

their bikes existed in the US.

The resulting MV America of 1975-6 used a further expanded 67mm x 56mm 790cc engine with 9.5:1 compression producing 75hp at7,500rpm. EPM cast alloy wheels were now an option to the spoked Borrani items, and gearshift was moved to the left side, courtesy of a cross-shaft behind the engine cases. A new, squared-off gas tank was mated to angular side panels and a suede-covered seat with a small glove box on the bump-stop. To meet US noise regulations, the four 26mm Dell’Ortos breathed through a new airbox, and the engine exhausted into matt black Lafranconi mufflers. (The original four-into-four chrome pipes remained an option, and were usually included in the crate with the bike.)

MV’s last gasp (before the modern era) was the 850SS of 1977, essentially an America bored out to 69mm giving 837cc. Only around

40 were built—and are now highly collectible.

When Agusta closed its doors in 1977, engineering and production boss Arturo Magni was left without a job. So with a collection of MV parts and three decades of experience, Magni set out to make the bikes that Agusta should have made in the first place. Dispensing with the heavy, power-robbing shaft drive, and fitting his machines with the best of available components, Magni produced small numbers of exquisitely crafted café racers, each with the trademark curved black pipes. The closest he ever came to a “production” run was the Moto Guzzi-based Sfida—but all Magnis are essentially hand-built specials.

With Arturo in partial retirement, his son, Giovanni has now taken up the mantle, and provided many components for the Bush special. He also undertakes custom work— more online at magni.it B

With Giovanni Magni, son of MV legend Arturo opposite: Count Agusta knew wealthy enthusiasts dreamt riding a bright red MV-four on the road: so he offered them this - in black…

Back issues

Back issues

Issue 1. Bob Carlos Clarke photographs: Moto Guzzi V7 Sport restoration: Laverda SFC to Italy in 1975: Ducati 750SS at Daytona: Cook Neilson interview: Ducati Paso history : Morini 350 on the Milano-Taranto: the original Milano-Taranto road race: Mondial lightweights: Moto Guzzi Condor: Gilera 500/4: Laverda 75: Phil Read.

Issue 4. Goodwood Revival: Gilera Saturno: Mods & Rockers: Lambretta record breakers: Why Italian motorcycles aren’t red: Bianchi 350 & Tazio Nuvolari: Lake Como by Guzzi V7: Ducati Darmah vs. Guzzi California: NCR and Rino Caracchi: Ducati Monster: Morini and Tarquinio Provini: Franco Lambertini interview

Issue 2. Coburn and Hughes ads: Ducati Pantah/TT2: Laverda Alpinos at the TT: Benelli Quattro: Renzo Pasolini at Benelli and Aermacchi: Harley Davidson two-strokes: Alejandro de Tomaso: Benelli Sei: Laverda V6: Moto Guzzi V8: Dustbin fairings: Touring Europe on a Guzzi Le Mans in 1976: MV750 Sport: Ducati 175 Silverstone.

Issue 5: Memories of a Ducati 750GT: Guzzi Bicilindrica: Guzzi V8: Sammy Miller on racing for Ducati and Mondial: MCC Trial by Mondial 125: Ducati Regolarita: Pat Slinn remembers: Forgotten marques: MV’s flat four and sixes: Restoring a Laverda Sprint: Morini Settobello and Rebello: Aermacchi’s story: Riding the ultimate Aermacchi single

Issue 3: Helmet art: Laverda Jotas in the Avon races: Moto Guzzis at the Spa 4 Hours: Mike Hailwood’s 1978 TT and the Ducati replica: Deja Blue: Replica 900SS: Sports Mopeds: Garelli 350: Giuliano Maoggi: Ducati 125

Desmo single and twin: Motogiros old and new: Morini 350vDucati Desmo 450: Frank Scurria interview.

Issue 6. Elizabeth Rabb’s photographs: Agip logos: Guzzi factory and desert racers: Laverda Atlas: Morini Camel: Ducati 350 Desmo and singles that never were: MV 350 twins: Snaps from a period photograph album: Racing the Benelli Sei at the TT: 1976 Ducati 900SS: Lambretta V-twin 250 GP racer: Laverda space frame.

Issue

young lady: Mike Hailwood’s original comeback: Ducati’s 125GP: Joey Dunlop’s Benelli Sei replica/Café Racer: Benelli 500/4s for Joey and Jarno Saarinen, plus 125 Jarno: Parilla 175 restoration: Racing a Guzzi at Spa:: 1971 Race of the Year: MV America with Magni upgrades: Racing a Morini 350.

in Italian rain.

These are the “old” 240mm x 205mm landscape format, designed as collectors items.

Buy online at teambenzina.co.uk, paypal to motorb1ke@teambenzina.co.uk or ‘phone 01380 812176 with a credit/debit card

UK bank account holders can post a cheque payable to G+J Pullen to 24 Kings Road, Easterton, Devizes SN10 4PX.

prices includes p+p: each issue is £8.25 to a uK address, £10.10 to the eu, £12.40 to rest of the world.

Buy issues 1 to 6 inclusive at the special price of £45 to a UK address, £50 to the EU, £62 to the rest of the world. A great gift, and we can add a card saying who it’s from absolutely free.

7. Ducati Diavel vs.

Issue 8. Gilera LTE500, Sferica 175 and CX-125 - part of Gilera’s post war fall from grace? Bimota DB1; Ivar’s archives featuring John Surtees and the Guzzi family; Part I of La Cuicciolina - a Lodola in the Alps; Laverda SFC to Italy; Reader’s 1977/78 TT photographs. Leo Tartarini; Ducati Darmah expertise, and ridden

Speciale numero due

the second special in this issue: rené Waters might have come to the ducati fold late, but his obsession knows no bounds. When not running ducatimeccanica .com he builds remarkable bevel twins. this is his story, from how it all started, to the latest incarnation of his own roadbike

Words: Rene Waters / Photos: Elise Waters

Idoubt that roads running hundreds of miles with barely a bend or change in elevation were quite what Dr Taglioni had in mind when he designed his Ducati bevel twins back in the early seventies, but that’s where this one ended up. How it got to the small town of Medicine Hat, Alberta on the western edge of the Canadian prairies might be an interesting tale in itself, maybe even as interesting as what happened to it after it got there. However, this part of its story begins in the back room of a liquor store in Calgary, Alberta in 1998.

Those were the days before eBay or Facespace, when email groups were hi-tech, and tiny low-res images on the web were hardly worth the download time needed to see them. I was soul baring with some fellow riders and admitted to a long held lust for a bevel twin. I had seen one in the tin for the first time in the early eighties, two of them in fact: a pair of 900SS, eye candy at a Ferrari dealership, as out of reach as the stunning cars they were upstaging. The Ducatis were the epitome of everything I thought a motorcycle should be. Almost twenty years and a dozen bikes later I was still harbouring that lust, but lamenting it would go unrequited because in Western Canada exotic Italian motorcycles are as rare as fat postmen.

“You can find anything if you look” was the view of one friend who, to prove his point, handed me a copy of the Southern Alberta Auto Trader with an ad circled: “Ducati for sale. Call.” Which I dutifully did.

“Which one are you interested in, the new one or the old one?”

“You have two!”

”Yep, but the new one’s sold”

”Good, because I’m interested in the old one. What year is it? What model?”

“No idea. It’s red - does that help?”

“Can I come and see it?”

“I’ll be here for another twenty minutes”

“I’m in Medicine Hat - it’ll take me a couple of hours to get to Calgary. Can you wait for a bit?”

“OK, but be here by five.”

I was.

As Darryl, liquor store owner and Ducati vendor, led me through the stacked cases of Molsen and Budweiser I spied not the lustedfor 900SS, but a lowly (by comparison and period press reviews) 900GTS. Even that wasn’t easy to tell, such was its state of disrepair: a very red replacement front end, no clocks, bolts sheathed with garden hose for foot pegs, cable tied Dodge truck mudflaps for

Top: the original 860 with seller. Would you buy from a man with a jacket like that? Note Egli forks, and why Canadians don’t ride in winter. This pic and previous page is the 2008 version of the 860

mudguards, a very non-stock headlight, and ugly gold anodized DID rims. Pretty much everything else was either leaking, dented or missing.

It wasn’t the 900SS of my fantasies, but there were similarities, and where was I going to find another bevel twin? To my shame I turned into a seller’s dream buyer: one who believes there will never be another opportunity like this. So I’m reasonably certain that on that cold February day a record price was set for a 900GTS …

With the help and pick-up truck of the fellow who found the ad, the bike was hauled away through drifting snow. “We should at least see if it’ll start, before I go,” he said as we pulled up outside my house, in a tone that implied more than a hint of challenge. I picked up the gauntlet. With the bike still in the truck, and after adding fresh fuel and jump cables, I applied the kick starter... vigorously. Two surprising things then happened: one, it started; and two, it rattled every pane of glass in the house, and probably those in half the street. Wow, what a sound!  Looking over at the house Sue, my wife, was standing at the window with two thumbs up and a grin from ear to ear. Despite every appearance to the contrary, the bike had proved it would run, and had just been awarded the matrimonial seal of approval.

Back then I didn’t have a garage and was I going to have to beg some shop space if the bike was going to do more than sit under a cover and a blanket of snow. This was my first foray into bike building and I had no idea where to look for parts, or even if they were available. Restoring the bike to original seemed like a Herculean task that would leave me with a bike that wasn’t really what I wanted. Much better to take the raw materials, I figured, and build something resembling the 900SS I’d seen all those years ago. With no mechanical background, no tools, and no place in which to work, it was an ambitious decision. But a friend, Kelly McLaughlin, was (and still is) not only an excellent mechanic and motorcycle restorer, but was also willing to let me have space in his garage and act as mentor.

The odd front forks turned out to be by Fritz Egli which was fortunate as I’d spent all my money acquiring the GTS. I traded them with a chap building an Egli Vincent in South Dakota for a complete front end from a Ducati 851 and a set of wheels from a 906 Paso. I found a steel 750 GT tank in Calgary while a fellow in Montreal made me a pair of fibreglass side covers and a seat using moulds taken from his 900SS. I discovered Phil Hitchcock at Road and Race in Australia and purchased an SS replica fairing along many other parts. In those days I didn’t (read couldn’t) weld on bracketry, so tank, seat, and fairing brackets were made up from aluminium and bolted on.

The 851 front end was a relatively simple swap, just requiring steering head bearings of the correct dimensions to mate the 851 stem to the GTS frame. The Paso’s rear wheel had a disc brake, where the GTS had a drum, so work was needed there. Luckily there was plenty of room in the GTS swing arm for the Paso’s 16”/160 rear wheel and tyre, so only new spacers were required. The final bike had some aesthetic issues, not least the 16” wheels, but on the whole it was much closer to the bike I had dreamed about than a stock 900GTS. On the road it was a tremendous success. So much so that over the next couple of years I sold all my other bikes, because they just weren’t being ridden. There was no comparison: the Ducati was such a wonderful machine. It handled with precision and rock-solid stability. And that sound. Not just the unmistakable exhaust note, but also the symphony of whirring, oily parts thrashing around in the motor. Magnificent. Perhaps I’m biased because even if the motor, with its eight bevel cut gears driving two cams, is not quiet by any standard I’ve become inured to the insults. These days the “Any engine making that racket has to be broken” comments just elicit an enigmatic smile.

It is an understatement to say that I was happy with the way the bike turned out. I kept it that way for close to ten years and 75,000 odd miles. Those“aesthetic issues”occasionally niggled, and many times I was tempted to at least replace the wheels, but the bike handled so well I was afraid changes might prove detrimental. I had been lucky with the 851 front end. The shorter M1R forks and 16” wheel worked with the long wheelbase of the bevel frame to provide a responsive, but planted, ride. Quicker steering than a stock bevel, without the typical “falling-into-corners” sensation associated with 16” wheels. It was simply a joy to ride.

By 2008 however the bike was getting tired, with the motor smoking like a Quebecois (apparently a French speaking native of Quebec – ed) and the bodywork showing the miles I’d piled on. The GTS had come with an aftermarket Lucas RITA ignition system which was now literally falling apart. I had repaired it several times, increasingly by the side of the road, but parts had become impossible to find. A major overhaul was on the horizon if I wanted to keep riding. At least there is a direct correlation between winter in Canada and building bikes. One of the reasons I build is because there are six

months of snow when I can’t ride. When October arrived my mind had already turned to the rebuild when I got a late night telephone call.

“Would you be interested in a Ducati I have for sale?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“One of those replicas”

“An old one?”

“Yes”

“A Hailwood?”

“I don’t know; I don’t think so. Maybe”

“What colour is it” See? I’m learning

“Red”

“When can I come and see it?” Or maybe not…

It turned out that the seller’s idea of an “old one” was a 2006 Paul Smart Replica, an ex-track bike, which his brother had bought online. It was close for here, where we measure distance in hours travelled - usually at 80mph - and there’s little or nothing closer than an hour away. So off I went, to find the Paul Smart replica’s signature turquoise showing through the red respray. The original Öhlins forks were gone, replaced with what looked like a pair from a Monster, and the Öhlins rear shock had been replaced with a Sport’s Sachs unit. The original cool aluminium rims had been replaced by not so cool steel ones, and the motor… well, wasn’t. There was nothing inside it, no crank, no gearbox, just a shell that had been sand blasted (with everything in place, including rockers and valves) presumably to make it look pretty in the "for sale" pictures. While the seller went on about how easy it would be to find a replacement motor and all the missing bits to rebuild it, my mind was on another bus. I had no intention of rebuilding the Paul Smart Replica. And this time I did get a good deal.

Taking stock of what I’d bought revealed a good frame and swing arm, and a tank and seat in fair condition. The fairing was scuffed, cracked and generally stuffed, but top and bottom yokes looked good even holding non-adjustable Marzocchi upside down forks. The 17” Ducati Sport Classic1000GT spoked wheels looked new, the front and rear brake systems came complete with Brembo master cylinders, callipers and rotors... and there was a very pretty battery box.

Here was a chance to replace the 16” mag wheels with a

sexy 17” spoked set, and upgrade the suspension and brakes at the same time. I would probably have to find a way to use that battery box too. If the bike was going to be pulled apart to make those changes I may as well address some of the aesthetic issues too. Being a graphic designer my “blueprint” was a Photoshop mock-up of what the upgraded bike would look like. I pinned it up in my bit of Kelly’s garage. Had I realised how those simple looking changes would set off an avalanche of necessary and might-as-well modifications I would have at least paused for thought before starting. It’s much simpler in Photoshop than the workshop.

I decided early on to rewire the bike and get rid of the bolt-on bracketry in favour of welded replacements, so disassembly meant a bare frame. Out came the reciprocating saw, starting with the obvious bits, but more and more started to come off as it became apparent how much needed changing. The rear mudguard, designed to fit the 900GTS wheel and tyre and just passable with the Paso tyre, was never going to look right with the 1000GT’s 180/55 17 item. Serendipitously Ducati had just introduced a chrome rear mudguard for the 1000GT which resulted in the earlier plastic ones becoming readily available (read cheap) on eBay. Having secured one, the next thing was to figure out how to attach it to the frame. The best solution seemed to be a new rear frame loop that would accept the new mudguard’s mounting point. The Paul Smart frame used the same arrangement as the 1000GT, so I used that as a pattern. Cutting off the kicked-up GTS rear loop and making a new one with a flat profile allowed me to weld on brackets to accept the Sport Classic mount. After cutting the frame about the mightas-wells really took over. I might-as-well change the old bolt on seat mounts; the battery tray should make way for the pretty new box; the GTS side cover mounts might-as-well go too, adding new ones in the “right” place. At the same time the regulator rectifier, now in the way of the pretty battery box,

might-as-well be moved up front into the airflow for better cooling, and the GTS tank mounts might-as-well be cut off and repositioned to eliminate the need for standoffs. Once at-it with the reciprocating saw it’s amazing how much stuff you don’t think the frame needs. I think I used a little over 9 feet of flat steel making up new brackets. And that battery box, once installed, was indeed pretty.

But then I thought the project was doomed. A test fitting of the new spoked wheel in the GTS swing hadn’t considered sprocket alignment. By the time I did, I was already committed. After much discussion with my friend and mentor, it was decided that the thing to do was to try and modify the swing arm. Worst case scenario we’d fail and have to build a swing arm from scratch: best, it would work and we wouldn’t have to build a swing arm from scratch. Looked at that way there was nothing to loose.

The challenge was to get the wheel close to the centre line of the bike and have the sprockets align. To achieve this the swing arm was cut longitudinally along the left arm and 3/16th flat steel welded in to form a D section, allowing the tyre to clear the swing arm on the left. The right arm was “relieved” and again strengthened with flat steel to allow clearance for the sprocket bolts. The sprocket carrier had to be machined down to get the sprocket as close to the hub as possible while still allowing the chain to clear the tyre - in the event it was slightly too close without “re-profiling” the tyre.

This was still not quite enough to get sprockets perfectly aligned, but a shouldered extension allowed the front sprocket to move outboard while still maintaining full engagement with the output shaft. Finally, the stock GTS 530 rear sprocket was replaced with a 520 and the inside of front sprocket machined down to match, and a 520 chain fitted. Disaster averted.

Original build with half fairing and Paso wheels

One really good feature of the GTS swing arm (860GT, 900GTS and Darmahs all share the same swing arm) is the way chain tension is adjusted. The swing arm pivots in an eccentric bush in the frame, while the wheel axle remains stationery in the swing arm, so once you make everything fit in the swing arm you are good. Nothing moves except as a unit, so no allowance need be made for the wheel movement that occurs on most motorcycles (Ducati 900SS included) when adjusting the chain tension.

At the front the plan was to simply replace the head bearings as before, but it turned out that the Paul Smart stem was too large and one of the Marzocchi fork legs was slightly bent. So in went a set of adjustable Showas, as fitted to a number of modern Ducatis, which proved a huge improvement over the Marzocchis without breaking the bank. I could also use the stock 25mm axle, spacers and bearings. A factory mudguard and mounts would also fit without altering. All I had to do fabricate a new stem. The stock Sport Classic steering head nut is recessed into the top yoke so the new stem was, of course, a smaller diameter than the nut. To solve this problem a tricky “top hat” nut was made with an inner thread to fit the new steering stem and an outer thread that the head nut screws on to. Head tension is determined with the inner nut, the Sport Classic nut screwing on over it for appearance’s sake.

After the modernisation of the front suspension something had to be done about the rear. Snapping up a bargain pair of Sport Classic 1000S shocks on eBay (the 1000S used dual shocks as opposed to earlier Sport Classics single shock) I excitedly called Kelly, only to be shot down in flames by his first question: How long are they? Ah. The GTS had 13” long shocks as standard, and my fancy new ones were 15”.  By now you may have spotted a pattern: not everything I do is planned. Fortunately the swing arm mods weren’t finished so cutting off the lower shock mounts and welding new ones just above the axle maintained ride height and geometry. The shocks have Heime type joints which means there was no issue with binding and adjustable damping and rebound made them a vast improvement over what had gone before.

With the frame and swing arm now out getting powder coated work began on the motor. The valve seats were receding but rather than replacing them the decision was made to re-cut and fit oversized valves. All the bearings and seals were replaced, as were some worn gears and dogs in the transmission. A spare set of cylinders were bored to 82.25mm and custom pistons from Ross Racing in California installed. The big-end bearings exhibited no play so were left alone. The crank sludge traps needed to be drilled in order to clean them out: it’s amazing how compacted they get. The set of desmo heads that were intended for this bike got left off

as I have come to value the convenience of the spring heads. A spring valve adjustment takes me about 20 minutes, compared to spending an afternoon with desmo heads on the bench while gently honing shims. On a bike that racks up the miles, spring heads are much easier to live with. For similar reasons the bike was re-fitted with 32mm Dell’Orto carburettors, which were stock on the GTS. The 40mm carbs might deliver 10-15 mph more top end at the expense of torque lower down, and there is no doubt they are more glamorous, but these days mid-range is more useful in my everyday riding.

Another thing I wanted to do was replace the worn out Contis. Conti silencers, an oxymoron if ever there was one, are what give the big Ducati twin its distinctive sound. I once installed a beautiful stainless steel two-into-one system and, while it offered marked improvements, the bike just didn’t sound like a bevel twin. This time around I was fortunate to find a new set of original Contis with Wolfgang Hearter at Columbia Car and Cycle in British Columbia. Wolfgang is probably better known to Laverda enthusiasts but, with Laverda and Ducati sharing so many components, he’s a good source for Ducati parts too. The Contis were 750 style silencers with a slightly shorter hanger than the three dimple type used on the 900cc bikes. I didn’t care. I cut off the brackets and made them fit.

opposite: Pierre Terblanche tries Rene’s bike for size; at the time Terblanche was Ducati’s chief designer. That twinkle in his eye is the start of the Sport Classic range; Metalwork on the swing arm persuades sprockets to align; Nice tee shirt! this page: another rider is a rare sight

Wolfgang also provided the new DMC electronic ignition system which means replacing the flywheel with a supplied weighted rotor to maintain harmonic balance. The clutch plates and springs were also replaced with a Surflex kit. With the new springs installed the clutch lever pull was ferocious, so I decided to convert it to a hydraulic system. Firmly in the grip of might-as-wells, a custom machined slave cylinder was fitted alongside the stock GTS clutch actuation arm with the hydraulic line exiting the cases where the arm did. This GTS has right side shift which means there is no crossover linkage, leaving room inside the shift box cover to fit the slave cylinder. Using the original clutch push rods, a Brembo master cylinder, and stainless braided line the bike now has a one finger clutch pull that I’m almost embarrassed to let people feel.

In 2008 I also decided to go naked. Removing the fairing meant my lust for a 900 SS was either sated having built one for Sue (featured in benzina #3), or more likely was overtaken by a previously unrecognized lust for a 750 Sport. When first remodelling the GTS I spotted a picture of Dan Kelo’s 750 Sport, taken from behind and to the side, and the bike looked stunning. From that moment on there was never any question that the GTS project would be yellow. That didn’t change in the 2008 re-build.

Next were instruments. The plan was to run the tachometer from the DMC control box and the speedo from a pick-up on the rear brake calliper mount that counts the revolutions of the rear rotor bolts to a set of electronic gauges from an S4 Monster. This would work just as soon as I figured out which of the 32 pins on the back of the clocks did what. Having decided to build a new wiring loom from scratch I might-aswell run everything through a bank of relays to take the load off the switches. I hid them up under the tank where the redundant coils for the RITA had been located. The big 203mm Bosch headlight from the old bike was mounted on the brackets from a 1000 Sport Classic that would fit right onto the Paul Smart yokes. I also decided to get the taillight from a Sport Classic as it would mount directly to the rear mudguard. I had originally intended fitting period CEV turn signals, but when the taillight unit was delivered with turn signals and wiring pre-installed I decided to use-as-was. It was expedient to do the same thing at the front although the turn signals got mounted without their standoffs to tuck them in a bit tighter. For switch gear I used an NOS left side from an early Monster and on the right just a Tomaselli twin pull throttle. The bars are aluminium round stock on risers from an ST3 Ducati that fit the 53mm fork tubes and allow some adjustability in height and angle.

The result was all I had hoped for. I had a bike that rode and handled like a modern sports bike, but had all the charisma of the classic 70s Italian icon. Riding through the mountains or around town was pure joy. What had been a technically

precise bike was now compliant and comfortable as well. The brakes had feel as opposed to the woodenness of the original Brembos, the suspension was almost infinitely adjustable, and I could now choose my own tyres. The bike garnered a lot of attention, online, in magazines, and wherever it went, taking “Best European Custom” at the Dime City Cycle/Cafe Racer TV show at last year’s Barber Vintage Festival in Birmingham Alabama. Unfortunately the bike did not make it home in one piece, and while I was fine, the bike was subsequently written off by my insurance company. In Alberta, this means that the frame (even though it was not damaged) can not be re-registered for road use without a complicated and uncertain re-certification process.

Fortunately the insurance company had required an independent appraisal prior to issuing an agreed value policy and so armed with a not insubstantial cheque, I had a decision to make - with apologies to Mr Shakespeare - to buy or not to buy. Or perhaps, to build or not to build: that was the question. I’d long since ceased to worry about the slings and arrows of outraged purists. I built what I wanted to ride. But my bike building in the past had been primarily driven by economic factors, namely I couldn’t really afford the bikes I wanted to ride. 860GTs and 900GTSs are (or were) affordable and, relatively easy to find. But now I had a lump sum, enough to buy an honest to goodness SS, or even a Sport... and therein lay the rub. What to do?

What indeed? More in the next issue of benzina which at least guarantees the decision involves Italian motorcycles.

Enough with the teasing – this is René’s post crash incarnation of the 860: full story and lots of lovely pics in the next issue of benzina

Like busses, you wait years for a Ducati bevel twin then three turn up. Original 860GT is rare in the UK – it seems the US and Aussies bought them all. René gets many parts from Andrew Jones at Mdinaitalia (opposite)

BIG IN BIG IN JAPAN

sports motorcycles and the 1982 suzuka 8-hours

Words and photos: Pat Slinn

June 1982. Kenny Murakami was visiting the Isle of Man TT, ostensibly as a sponsor of Sports Motor Cycles, but also to invite the team to enter the Suzuka 8-hour race. This would be the fifth round of the endurance world championship and held on August 1st. Kenny was a successful businessman, as well as a Tokyo Ducati dealer, and Sports Motorcycles would visit Japan as his guests. He had already persuaded an American team to join him, led by ex-Ducati engineer Rino Leoni. Rino had moved to the States to prepare Ducati singles for racing and had moved on to the V-twins with great success. Jimmy Adamo and Doug Lantz would be riding for him.

Jumping at the chance, Steve Wynne and I set about deciding on riders. The first choice was obvious: Tony Rutter had won the 1981 Formula Two world championship, initially riding a Sports Motorcycle Ducati Pantah and latterly a TT2 which he would also use to win the 1982 championship. We then settled on George Fogarty as the team Sports co-rider: coincidentally both riders had sons (Michael and Carl) who would go on to be successful riders in their own right.

Tony and George would ride the Sports Motor Cycles

Formula One machine, a 1979 Ducati F1 900NCR, originally supplied by the factory for Mike Hailwood to defend his TT F1 world championship title with. Since then it had led a colourful life, although perhaps it’s worth remembering that the 1979 TT bike had really been an embarrassment to both Ducati and NCR. Suffering both engine and handling problems, during practice for the F1 TT we had switched to the rolling chassis Roger Nicholls used in 1978. Post-TT, the ’79 chassis was handed to Ron Williams of Maxton engineering, at the time also a consultant for Honda HRC. Ron put a lot of work into the frame as well as the “experimental” Marzocchi front forks. After Ron’s ministrations the Ducati handled and steered a lot better.

JAPAN JAPAN

Below: George Fogarty (in hat) and Tony Rutter (almost wearing leathers) with the bike Mike Hailwood rode in the 1979 TT

In following years the F1 was raced at various events by Tony and George, as well as Eddie Roberts and Ian Richardson. I think Steve also raced it at Daytona in 1982. However at that year’s TT George crashed the bike at the bottom of the notorious Bray Hill, sliding down the centre of the road at 140 mph, almost unbelievably missing every kerb, wall and tree to come to a halt about 150 metres down the road. George lost a lot of skin and was generally knocked about, but recovered to finish fourth in the following week’s F2 race. Unfortunately the bike didn’t fare as well, bursting into flames and destroying all the fibreglass, pipes and cables. Fortunately the TT marshals managed to extinguish the flames before the heat affected the aluminium and steel on the bike. After a swift rebuild it competed in the Portuguese F1 round in June before returning to Sports Motorcycles in Manchester for a complete overhaul in preparation for Suzuka. Steve worked on the engine and I was responsible for the chassis.

Our flights and journey to Tokyo, via a refuelling stop in Alaska, was uneventful once George and Jean Fogarty had dealt with leaving their passports at home. For the first couple of days we stayed at the Hyatt Regency, a very luxurious hotel in the Shinjakunishiguchi district, right in the centre of Tokyo. The room Kenny had booked for me and my wife Elaine was on the twentieth floor, and we were pleased to find his-and-hers Kimonos as well as a swimming pool on the top floor looking out across Tokyo. The memory of that view has stayed with us, as have the Kimonos.

That first evening Kenny and his wife Keiko took the entire Sports Motorcycle team out to dinner, although we were all so exhausted that it soon turned into an early night. The following day was spent sight-seeing, with Keiko making sure we visited the best sights including the royal palace and many wonderful gardens. The following day we were introduced to the US team: I had already met Rino a couple of times at the Ducati factory, but I didn’t know Jimmy Adamo, Doug Lantz or the rest of their team. We lunched at Murayama Motors, the Ducati importers, and in the evening they treated us to a traditional Japanese meal. Sitting on floor cushions around a very colourful - and very full – table laden with exotica (for an Englishman at least) including whale meat, strange looking vegetables and copious amounts of Saki. Between every man and their wife or girlfriend sat a

Whoops – all that was left when Fogarty crashed at the bottom of Bray Hill above: Pat still has his copy of the race regulations – in English, fortunately

benzina

geisha girl whose role was to attend to all our culinary needs, even following us to the lavatory to offer hot towels. Then it was on to a night club where a full bottle of Johnny Walker whisky stood proudly on each table. The highlight of the evening, however, was George Fogarty - in his broad Lancastrian accent - singing Rule Britannia and God save the Queen to the entire nightclub.

The real work started the next day with the journey to Suzuka. We started by travelling west, along the south coast to Nagoya, on the Shinkansen “Bullet” train: the trip took the best part of three hours - not bad given we covered well over 200 miles. Disappointingly, bad weather hid Mount Fuji as we passed by, although watching attendants literally pushing people onto the crowded train to be sure of leaving stations exactly on time, almost made up for it. The other novelty was the toilets – although the train felt like an airliner with its small windows, the toilet cubicles had little more than holes in the floor. There was one “western” WC, complete with detailed instructions for use, but this was such a novelty there was always a long queue.

And then it was another couple of hours in a minibus to get to Suzuka. Constructed in 1962 this is Japan’s oldest racing circuit, with a unique figure of eight layout running 3.6135 miles in length. Owned by the Mobility

Corporation, a subsidiary of the Honda motor company, it also incorporates a large amusement park. Both the American and Sports Motorcycles Ducatis were delivered to the circuit later that day, and we set about un-crating and preparing them for the following day’s scrutineering and practice. Both teams were supposed to be staying at the circuit hotel but a booking mistake left us two rooms short, and the best alternative the hotel management could offer was over forty miles away. Kenny and Keiko joined Elaine and me on our enforced commute.

Next day, with scrutineering and accreditation out of the way, we could get on with practice and qualifying. Tony went out for the first session, coming in after a few laps to have the bike checked over; there didn’t look to be any issues and Tony seemed happy with the bike, saying it “Felt good and pulled strongly.” However, there was a slight oily deposit in front of the rear cylinder, on the right hand side. Tony went back out, picking up the lap times as he became familiar with the circuit. Then it was George’s turn and the oily deposit didn’t seem to be any worse when he came back in. Unfortunately during one of George’s stints he crashed; it seemed he had just overdone it on one of the slowest corners. There wasn’t too much damage to the bike apart from the inevitable scratches, a couple of bent brackets and a flattened megaphone which were soon dealt with.

Scrutineering: note headlight – required by world endurance championship regulations even though the Suzuka round runs in daylight.

Steve Wynne holding the bike, a young Michael Rutter at the back, Kenny Murakami on right.

Then during the final session the oil leak got a lot worse: actually it was pouring out. There was nothing for it but to lift the rear cylinder to establish exactly what the problem was. We soon discovered that the crankcase had cracked on both sides of the right hand front cylinder stud, leaving us with no alternative but to completely strip the engine and weld the crack. Whilst Steve striped

the engine I went off with Kenny to try and find somebody who would let me use their welding equipment. Considering Suzuka belongs to Honda it seemed sensible to try them first. They had a large workshop on the inside of the circuit, but there was no way they were going to let anybody near their equipment, or allow any of their staff to do the job. Their explanation was that they didn’t want

above: the cruelty of racing – a fluffed attempt to start the Ducati lets most of the field get away. Takes a brave man to kickstart a big Duke in trainers, and a braver one to wear those short-shorts. But then Steve Wynne is a legend. this pic: Suzuka pits, right hand crankcase draining of oil prior to welding. Don’t worry about the “no fire” sign, Pat. Note Sports Motorcycles’ leathers on the right.

to be responsible if the welding was unsuccessful, or, I suppose, for us dumping oil on the track. Next we tried a Japanese team who were running a Ducati with a 1978 F1 engine. Their motor was stripped for checking, the first time they had tried this, but they had realised no-one knew how to reset the valve timing. I was happy to help them out, in front of about twenty oh!-ing and ah!-ing supporters. Fortunately one of the people watching was a friend of Kenny’s, and an engineer with the Yoshimura Suzuki team, looking after Wes Cooley and Dave Aldana. Kenny explained the problem and we were taken along to the team’s garage where I was introduced to “Pops” Yoshimura. He was only too pleased to help and, although they didn’t have the necessary equipment at the circuit, I was welcome to come back to their workshops that evening to use their welding kit. However, like Honda, they would not accept any responsibility and said we must work alone.

Later, as I was preparing the crankcases for welding, Pops came into the workshop in a very colourful Kimono, bowing to his staff, before turning to me with a bow and a “Good evening” in English. With the crankcase repaired it was straight back to the circuit for Steve to rebuild the engine. Before we left that evening the engine was back in the frame, ready for a tidy up and scrutineering the following morning. Final qualifying was also a morningonly session, with the national four hour race running in the afternoon. If memory serves, the bike ran faultlessly with Tony and George both happy with it and qualifying in twenty-ninth place. Jimmy and Doug qualified twentyeighth. The afternoon was spent making sure we were all ready for the next day’s 8-hour race. Pops Yoshimura even made a point of coming over to our garage to see us and ask how the repair to the crankcase was working out.

But come race day the weather had changed dramatically. Our forty mile drive into Suzuka was made in torrential rain, and the weather forecast warned that

was just the beginning of a tropical typhoon. In fact we felt lucky to get to the circuit, driving through a couple of floods and a lot of diversions, accompanied by relentless rain. Arriving at the circuit we found the organizers already had the rain sweepers (small vehicles with big brushes on the front) driving around, trying to clear water from the track. It was still pouring with oddly warm rain as I waited in the queue to have Michelin fit full wets to our wheels. Some French people in the queue asked the Michelin guys if they thought that the race would be postponed or even cancelled: “A bit of rain won’t stop a Japanese race meeting going ahead” was the response. I’ve still got my notes from that day, which read “Official weather forecast: tropical typhoon, heavy and wet.”

By the time the race was due to start water was pouring down pit lane like a river. The Ducati, unlike the Japanese machines, did not have an electric start: in fact, we were lucky that our F1 had been built in endurance racing trim, so at least had a kickstart of sorts. But our kickstart was quite unlike a road bike’s, really being a nod to the FIM regulations requiring a starting mechanism for endurance racing, over and above simply relying on bump starting, as most racers do. The F1 had a loose kickstart lever which pushed onto a square section crank. The lever was machined to match, rather than using the usual pinch bolt arrangement, so that it could be quickly removed once the engine was running. As the race had a Le Mans start, with riders lining up across the track before running to their bikes when the flag dropped, Steve elected to kickstart the bike as Tony (who would ride our first stint) ran over. Deciding his rain suit would be too cumbersome, Steve stripped to his shorts and trainers. As the starter’s flag dropped some riders made lightening getaways, but Steve’s attempt to start our bike saw the kickstart lever flying across the track and he had to retrieve, refit it and start again. Eventually the bike burst into life and Tony was away, with the intention of riding the first twenty or so laps before handing over George.

It was now raining so very hard that rods of water were falling vertically before bouncing straight back up. Within a couple of laps the race favourites, Mike Baldwin and Kengo Iyama on the factory Honda , crashed out. Soon it was impossible to recognize the bikes passing: Elaine was lap scoring on the pit wall and having to rely on the sound of the Ducati to be sure of spotting Tony or George. Dave Aldana, while leading the race on the Yoshimura Suzuki, crashed entering the main straight and came sliding by on his front imitating a swimmer doing the breaststroke. Because his bike slid past the start/finish line Dave had to pick it up, kick it straight and ride a complete circuit before he could enter the pits for repairs. After a lengthy pit stop, the team were eventually back in the race, and would go on to finish a creditable sixth.

After four hours of racing I felt nobody really knew who was leading. Elaine was sitting as low as she could behind the pit wall and still see over it, with an umbrella covering her and the lap scoring board. She was also responsible for getting the attention of people when it was time to call Tony or George in for fuel. It is one of the few races Elaine has a clear memory of: “I was under all this clear plastic sheeting, but the lap charts were getting soaked and just tore when you tried to write on them.” My own memory is that it rained for the entire race. Rained? There isn’t really a word or phrase in the English language to describe the severity of the downpour. Yet our Sports Motorcycles Ducati was running well, with Tony and George swapping places with Jimmy and Doug until, after 87 laps, gearbox problems forced George to

retire. Rino’s bike carried on to finish twenty-seventh, completing 108 laps. At least the atrocious weather meant the race was eventually shortened from the planned eight hours to six, finally being won by the Japanese pairing of Shigeo Iijima and Shigeo Hagiwara on a Honda CB900F. They completed 120 laps. That’s an average of 72mph (116km/h) on a pretty standard road bike under typhoon conditions.

Getting to our hotel that evening took forever, with many diversions in place. Our final journey back to Suzuka the following morning was even longer, and by the time we made it back to the circuit Steve and an army of Kenny’s helpers almost had the Ducati crated up.

The bullet train back to Tokyo was more of a tortoise train, with long periods when the train was just stationery. The typhoon had affected all of southern Japan, and we could do nothing except stare across landscapes of flooded fields and villages, and wait until we finally arrived in Tokyo. For the last evening of our Japanese experience Kenny had booked us into another Hyatt hotel, the Keio Plaza, this time in the Shinjuka district close to the 1964 Olympics’ stadium. Elaine and I spent the rest of the day exploring the Olympic park and more of Tokyo, eating that evening with Kenny and Keiko in a Japanese-European restaurant; as you might expect, a curious mix of Japanese and European food. Then Dave Aldana invited us to join his table, and later Rino, Jimmy and Doug, along with the rest of their team joined us. Quite an evening, and a fitting end to what had been quite an experience. B

Opposite: Another legend – Pops Yoshimura in person. This page: You have to include the Ferris wheel in any story about Suzuka – it’s publishing law

Mr Dainese

Words: Gary Inman / Photo: Chippy Wood

You have to love a man with both a genuine astronaut’s suit and a dessicated armadillo in his office. Lino Dainese is the founding father and still the guiding hand of the eponymous Italian safety brand. He splits his time between two offices: one in the small town of Molvena, where the company was formed, an office he can cycle to from home; the other at the side of the Autoroute in Vicenza, a corporate HQ with better links to airports and Il Cubo Nero – an incredible hightech distribution centre in the shape of a black cube.

We meet Mr D at the Molvena base. This is where the incredible archive of over 500 race suits is housed, where racers visit to be measured (no tapes are involved, all is done by Silvano, who fits a rider in an off-the-peg suit, then pinches and pulls, while making notes on how much snugger the custom suit must be). This too is where the one-off suits are made, where Dainese's innovations like the back protector, the glove with external armour and the revolutionary D-Air Race and D-Air Street systems were developed. Molvena is Lino Dainese’s creative hub; Vicenza is all about the business of marketing and selling the innovations.

‘This is the ideas room,’ the President explains, ‘where the future products are born. Here, I concern myself with ideas, the development of the business and getting the products into the marketplace. You’d have to see my office in Vicenza, it’s so different to here. I prefer this one. I’m more creative than commercial. I feel freer here.’

I have seen his Vicenza office. It has character, but no armadillos.

Dainese is a company that places equal importance on marketing and technological development. While it could be argued it may no longer leads in the former, it is at the cutting edge of the latter. Lino Dainese quickly realized it doesn't matter how good your products are if no one knows about them. The importance of working with the world’s leading riders was obvious to him. Giacomo Agostini raced in Dainese suits, but the firm's big break came in the shape of an Englishman.

‘Barry Sheene was the first champion who did the whole season with us, in ’77,’ Dainese explains.

‘That led to Europe-wide success for us. Carl Fogarty was important as well, even if I didn’t have the same sort of relationship with him that I had with Sheene – who was

a real part of the team.’

For a company with this profile, Dainese supports a modest number of riders, but the roster is peppered with UK racers. Leon Haslam represents the firm, along with Max Biaggi in World Superbike, while Alastair Seeley is the British Superbike representative and the duo of Conor Cummins and Guy Martin wear Dainese and AGV on the real road circuits.

‘We demand a certain kind of rider,’ says Dainese, from behind his uncluttered desk. ‘The riders we support are chosen for their ability, for their quality of feedback and how open they are to innovation. Their attitude towards innovation is crucial. They are the best people to understand the small differences when we are developing things like the back protector or the D-Air system. The rider who doesn’t embrace innovation and technology is not a good rider for us, even if he is a world champion.’

I take this as a dig at Jorge Lorenzo, who left Dainese to join rivals Alpinestars at the end of his championshipwinning season. If you believe the rumours, the Spaniard did so because he couldn’t bear to do any PR with Valentino Rossi and realised he would always be second fiddle to the Italian (although, if that’s important to him, at Alpinestars he appears to be second fiddle to Casey Stoner).

‘We got together with Valentino when he was twelve,’ Dainese recalls, ‘I remember he came here the one time with his father, before he was famous. It was winter and they were sleeping in this little camper van with no heating and I saw him in there under a big heap of blankets to keep warm.’

Dainese has had a relationship with Rossi since then. The bond grew stronger when the clothing company took sole ownership of AGV in 2007, and made Rossi Honorary President. Dainese had the world's most famous rider covered head-to-toe – the deal it aims to strike with all its riders, with very few exceptions. Dainese says this ‘head-to-toe coverage’ is the optimum, not for marketing reasons - although they’re obviously a consideration - but because, ‘It is the best way to understand the protection we are developing. We prefer this so we can control the weight and the protection dynamics.’ Some riders - like Nicky Hayden and Haslamuse different manufacturers’ helmets and Dainese claims they don’t integrate into the overall protection ‘package’ as well as AGV helmets.

And although Rossi is the company figurehead, if one of his special, headline-grabbing, helmets – for example, the Mugello 2008 `gobsmacked face’ design - requires the removal of AGV’s tricolore logo from its traditional forehead position, it is Mr Dainese whom Rossi must ask for permission. It’s obvious Dainese is a huge admirer of Rossi, and the partnership has worked well for both parties. I can’t imagine Dainese saying no to much that number 46 comes up with.

‘What strikes you about Rossi is that he’s extremely natural in what he does, both in his private life and on the track,’ says Dainese. ‘It seems as if everything happens by chance, that it comes easily, but when you see him at the track, in the pits, he’ll have a circuit map and for every corner he’ll indicate this and that about the telemetry, the motor, the electronics, the suspension... so, you see, he’s a computer. A man, but with a computer for a head. That really struck me.’

While Rossi has been important to the firm, it would be nothing without us, the road riders who choose Dainese and AGV. And the man whose name is on the leathers acknowledges that fact.

‘When I see the Dainese name on a road rider’s leathers it means so much, because it means they believe in us and the research that is behind all our products. It’s like a gift to me, thanking us for what we do. I don’t look at it from an economic point of view. I’m happy because they trust the company, they trust part of their life to Dainese.’

On the shelves of Lino’s Vicenza office is a photo of a

customer holding his battered back protector. The rider sent a letter and the photo thanking the firm for saving his spine. It meant so much to Mr Dainese he framed it. And while Lino Dainese doesn’t ride on the road now, the whole company was born out of a heck of a road trip.

‘In June 1968, when I was 19, Franco, Mario and I - three friends with three bikes; a Vespa, a Morini and a Laverda -rode to London and back. We set off with motorbikes and a tent and rode from Vicenza to Monaco, Cologne, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Paris, Bern…

‘When I rode that trip to England I saw my first leather suits. I was fascinated by these knights on their iron horses – the Nortons, the AJSs. So, when I came home I worked on an idea that had struck me, and I said to myself: “I’m going to make myself leather clothes for riding bikes.” I made real the desire to create and produce a suit by finding the hides in a tannery and a tailor. Bringing together precious artisan know-how. I made myself the first motocross pants, my first motorcycling trousers. And I realised that this was my work. This was intuition. The conception of an entrepreneurial idea. And here I am.’

Here he is, in an empire of his own creation, with his name on the front wall; a place ‘that continually feeds itself with ideas.’ And a place where a man can be so inspired by the armour of an armadillo that he has a very peaceful - but very dead - one placed on the corner of his desk. My kind of place. B

a man so inspired by an armadillo that he has a very peacefulbut very dead - one on his desk

Dainese apparently don’t offer protective clothing to their PR girls

Photo: Rynjim’

Expert:Ducati widecase singles

love the idea of a ducati single but worry about fragility? t he widecase option is for you

Words: Howard Davies Photos: Vicki Smith /Greg

Widecase singles are named after, and identified by, the rear engine mounts being some twoand-a-half times the width of the front engine mounts. They were a natural and progressive development of the narrowcase singles, which had been around in one form or another since 1955. By the mid ‘60s they were perceived as getting rather tired and showing their age & previous design imperfections as capacities and power outputs grew. The update allowed Ducati’s revered Chief Engineer Dr Taglioni the opportunity to incorporate his Desmodromic design into roadgoing production machines for the first time.

Enter the widecase era; at the September 1967 Cologne Show when the 350 Scrambler (SCR) was unveiled to the public for the very first time. Mark3 and Desmo designs soon followed. Engines were available in 250, 350 and 450cc (nominal). Also 239cc for the French market (to escape French taxation class in force at that time). Engine numbers are stamped on the front of the crankcases, adjacent to the front engine mounting points. They will typically be DM*** on the left hand case and a 6 figure reference number on the right hand case.

Inadequacies that were addressed during the upgrade included an improved kick-start design (previously best

described as ‘fragile’), strengthened bottom end (big end and main bearings) and improvements to the gearbox and selector box amongst others. Sump capacity was also increased from 3.75 to 5.50 pints.

The widecase engines use essentially the same engine castings throughout the model range with the glaring exception being the barrel casting. 250 models had 8 fins, 350’s had 9 and the 450’s had 10 fins. Cast iron cylinder liners were shrunk fitted to the barrel castings.

The model range from inception in 1968 to conclusion in 1974 included Scramblers (SCR), Mark3, Desmo, RT and TS. The (Spanish) Mototrans and (Swiss) Condor lookalikes are best excluded from a generic widecase article purely for considerations of space available.

So what are they like to run then you’ll want to know?

The real joy of running a widecase, especially a MarkIII or a Desmo, is out on the open road. Superlative handling with a willing and responsive engine make for real-road delight; avoid the skinny little B roads and the long open boredom of the dual carriageway and you will find yourself in a small corner of Italian Nirvana. You’re seventeen again, dancing with Cinderella clasped tight to your youthful groin, and it is five minutes to midnight. It just doesn’t get much better.

Expert:Ducati widecase singles

Expert:Ducati widecase singles

ScramblersDr Taglioni’s favourite widecases opposite: widecases awaiting a desmopro rebuild

But the warts of the ugly sisters are not far away. Original paint, chrome & wiring? Laughable. 6 volt charging system? Pathetic, and barely adequate even when new. Swing arm lubrication – operationally challenged would be the kindest comment. All easily sorted and parts are readily available. What is not so easily sorted is the lubrication system, which may variously be described as primitive or even primeval. A gear-type oil pump takes unfiltered oil from the sump and forces (gently coaxes?) it into the right hand end of the crankshaft. As it passes through, centrifugal force separates the crud from the oil. Said crud may be removed from the crankshaft cheek plates when the engine is stripped for inspection. Simple and effective but it relies on having good oil, an effective oil pump and keeping the engine revolutions high to facilitate effective oil flow and separation of contaminants from oil. High load and low revs (lugging) is the death knell as far as widecase big ends go. Not to further complicate matters but there are also 3 sizes of (roller) big end pin in use so you need to know what size you have fitted before ordering up replacement parts for any future rebuild. Multiply that by the different

size small end bearings (plain bush) and you can see that it would be easy to end up with an incompatible con rod/ big end bearing kit.

hIGh load

Trying to catalogue model specifications for the widecase era is like trying to knit smoke. At that time, Ducati was government owned, finances were parlous and the future was very uncertain. If it was available and in stock then it went onto the bike. Suspension was generally by Marzocchi, but Ceriani also made an appearance. Carburettors were originally 29mm Dell’Orto SSI, then square slide Dell’Orto VHB29, but some variants had Amal Concentrics. Rims by Borrani (and Radaelli). Ignition by Ducati Eletronica (or Motoplat). Instruments by Smiths, CEV or Veglia. Silencing by Lafranconi or Silentium and so it goes on. If you’re an anorak about such matters then the best advice would be to invest in some good reference material. Just be prepared for someone to come up and say “That was never standard”.

What’s hot and what’s not? Currently incandescent are the yellow Desmo machines of 1973/74. An exceptional

condition, single owner from new, original drum braked 450 Desmo version has recently sold in a private sale for £9,000. A Tony Brancato restoration made £12,000. Rapidly appreciating classic machines that epitomise the term ‘sporting single’. Following very close behind are the Desmo’s Silver Shotgun predecessors of 1971/72, visions of delight in metal flake. Currently lagging somewhat behind are the personal favourites of the great Dottore, the SCR Scramblers, greatly undervalued but still handsome and useable machines in their own right. Viewed, unfairly in my opinion, as organ donors to the racing fraternity.

Spares situation is generally good. Major castings and tinware are currently the only items that are really problematic. Quality reproduction parts are generally available; from replica Ceriani forks to complete fibreglass bodywork kits. If you have an engine, coupled with some determination and a willingness to spend, then the options available are virtually limitless. Sensible modifications would likely include an upgrade to a modern 12 volt charging system, a contactless ignition system, taper roller head bearings, high flow oil pump, modern Dell’Orto PHB carburettor and modified swing arm lubrication measures. All of which are discrete and non-permanent so that the machine might be returned to original specification should the need arise. The

popularity amongst the racing fraternity of the widecase engine machines ensures the provision of a steady stream of high quality pattern parts, a welcome bonus for those who want to keep their machines road ready.

If you’re buying, consider the owner as much as the bike. MoTs, receipts for components and a good selection of the special tools needed are all a good sign. If you’re contemplating a rebuild yourself then special tools are a must as are workshop manuals and parts catalogues. Finally nothing is more certain to start a fight amongst bevel aficionados than the subject of engine oil. The best advice I ever received regarding a widecase single was “throw good oil away”. That is not to say that you should use the cheapo WalMart type oil but rather that you should change the oil with a zealous obsession before it degenerates. 1,000 miles between changes should be considered the maximum. Straight 50 Silkolene Chatsworth comes highly recommended, as does fully synthetic Silkolene Comp4 20/50.

Then wind them up out on the open road; it’s what they were born for.

Howard is proprietor of the eponymous widecase.com (++44(0)1490 412621) purveyor of all you need to keep your widecase Ducati single up and running B

__Benzina___

thanks to

team Benzina would like to thank: Ivar de Gier, Brian Ashley, Christine Smith, Pat Slinn, Richard Skelton, Joanna, Eve and Will. And - of course - all the contributors and advertisers. Sorry if we’ve forgotten anybody – your help and inspiration has been invaluable.

Front cover image Elise Waters

We have a choice in the END

Motorcycles are for riding. It might seem an obvious statement but, if you own an old motorcycle, some days it needs saying - especially to anyone unwittingly spending more time in the garage than on the road. Unless you don’t have a garage, and you’re spending spanner time by the side of the road you should be riding along. Maybe time at the workbench has even become a displacement activity for some “riders”, providing a subliminal excuse not to just get out there. Certainly autojumble car parks make it look that way, with only a handful of motorcycles parked up and mightily outnumbered by fields of cars. Eavesdropping soon completes the picture: autojumbles are for people seeking out that elusive part “to get back on the road.” Really? Often these folk are serial restorers and anyway, if it was just about getting back on the road why are you looking for a new-old-stock remote floatbowl to fit a 29mm 1956 Dell’Orto SSi carburettor? Why not just fit a modern Amal and get riding? Or - whisper it - just go and meet the nicest people on a Honda? Could it be you’ve actually fallen out of love with riding and have fallen in love with motorcycles as objet d’art? Or maybe the truth is that riding on our overcrowded, bad tempered, potholed roads, polished by the mud and rain of a British summer, can no longer compete with the temptations of a cosy man-den laid out with a fine array of Snap-On tools.

Words: Hans Jansens, Ian Gowanloch, Mark Williams, Ivar de Gier, Richard Varley, Gordon de la Mare, Alan Cathcart, Robert Smith, Rene Waters, Pat Slinn, Gary Inman, Howard Davies. Photos: Hans Jansen, Russ Murray, John Faulkner, Richard Varley, Paul Hart, A Herl, Kyoichi Nakamura, Robert Smith, Chipy Wood, Elise Waters, Pat Slinn, Vicki Smith. Brilliant effort, all of them, and much appreciated.

As a lapsed Catholic, I feel the need to make a confession: I hate workshop time. The theory of motorcycle engineering might be endlessly fascinating, but the realities of the workshop rarely are: well, not to me at least. Rusty, unloved nuts are always a source of frustration, with or without the innuendos. Forty year old motorcycles might be sold with the claim of “One careful owner” but at least some of the other sixteen fools on the logbook must have needed screwdrivers with “Hold this end” scribed on the handle. Araldite where Helicoils were needed; tyres with rotation arrows suggesting the bike was used in a circus – because it should have been ridden backwards – and allegedly new-old-stock exhausts that line up about as well as Italians in a queue; these are just some of the bodges discovered on my own motorcycles this summer. It seems every time I make a deal with myself to spend an hour sorting out a minor hiccough in return for an afternoon’s riding, the afternoon becomes a missed suppertime trying to unravel a cat’s-cradle of workshop incompetence: both mine and the previous owners’. Spending more on tools than tyres, the right tool for the job always seemed to prove why it was in stock: nobody else bothered. Dark evenings drifted into dark thoughts: maybe I should just sell up, and get something new and trouble free, just like I did before the old Italian bike bug bit all those years ago.

But that wouldn’t be, as Robert Pirsig put it, the quality option. Nor, to paraphrase JFK, should we choose to do things just because they are easy: sometimes it’s good to do things because they are hard. But then riding an ancient Italian motorcycle in a land where they turn back time and ride on the wrong side of the road can be hard enough.

After the Olympics, one of Team GB’s sports psychologists spoke about his work with the athletes. The most fascinating part was how these sports-demigods motivate themselves to grind on for four years, getting up to train in the rain, the cold and the dark: when muscles ache and stomach’s rumble, with no certainty of being selected to represent your country, let alone win a medal. How to keep going when what you’re preparing for is so distant, so nebulous. Just like someone stuck in the garage with a recalcitrant motorcycle that they would rather be riding. In short, when you want to give up, how can you keep going?

Publisher & Editor Greg Pullen © 2012

www.teambenzina.co.uk

Chief photographic consultant Vicki Smith

www.ducati.net

Printed in the UK by Cambrian Printers Ltd

Apparently the answer is: remind yourself that you –and nobody else - chose to do this thing. If you now choose not to do this thing, give up and move on. The subtext is, of course, is that makes you a quitter. But a vague and distant promise of something better will never keep motivation levels up indefinitely. The thought of riding across Puglia next summer can no more persuade a rider to spend evenings at the workbench than the chance of a gold medal four years from now can drag Bradley Wiggins’ bicycle up a mountain. You have to want to do it, to accept this is what you’ve chosen to be defined by, and get on with it

ISSN2043-0744

Lower Heath Ground, Easterton, Devizes SN10 4PX

So my bikes went in a van to a real-life professional mechanic. Couldn’t really afford it, but I’m a rider not workshop-man. What I choose to do is ride Italian motorcycles, and a little thing like a woeful lack of talent with spanners isn’t going to get in the way. If you choose workshop time over riding, you have my unconditional admiration. But not an ounce of envy, because time is scarce and for some of us the lure of the open road is irresistible. Choose life; choose riding. Preferably on an Italian motorcycle in its homeland.. B

Brakes photo right: Vicki Smith. More on the drum-braked MV Agusta F4 Special (below, right) on page 27, and on the Dondolino (bottom) on page 50

One year/6 issues*