Taglioni’s 125cc four wasn’t some cobbled-together prototype, but a beautifully assembled miniature marvel featuring exquisite castings and a general design flair that is breathtaking, even by today’s standards of technology. Safe peak revs were 17,000rpm, with peak power arriving at 14,000rpm. A squish-band, a compression ratio of 12:1 (high for the day) and forged pistons helped balance reliability with performance.
#Moto ducar 125 series#
The cams were driven by a series of gears that ran up the left side of the engine behind an elegant Y-shaped cowling, and the cylinders were inclined forward 40 degrees, with deep fins on the front to aid air cooling. One wing of the museum is dedicated to Morbidelli race bikes. A further indication of the engine’s compactness was the fact that special, very small 8mm spark plugs had to be manufactured to light the fire owing to the lack of room upstairs. The 16-valve engine had a barely over-square bore and stroke of 34.5mm by 34mm, encouraging high revs. Instead, the double overhead cam heads ran four valves per cylinder – the first time Taglioni had publicly produced an engine so equipped – operated by conventional springs. The compact engine design meant there wasn’t enough room to fit Taglioni’s preferred desmo valve operation inside the new racer. It weighed just 187 pounds (85 kilograms) without its fairing, about the same as Ducati’s 125cc desmo single-cylinder GP racer of the late-1950s. At 12.6 inches (320mm), the across-the-frame 4-cylinder was barely wider than Ducati’s earlier twin. A close lookīefore we reveal its Achilles’ heel, let’s examine the 125 in detail. The theory that created the birth of an amazing prototype was that a higher-revving multi-cylinder could produce more than the 24 horsepower at 15,000rpm of the twin. If it worked there, then maybe the project could be brought across to the world Grand Prix championship.Īnd so, Fabio Taglioni dusted off his original plans and reworked the design into a little gem of a racer. Unlike Ducati’s original 4-cylinder strategy, the intention this time was to race the new bike in the Spanish domestic championship with the goal of knocking Bultaco’s new TSS 2-stroke off the podium. The relationship was so close that Ducati had sent several of its factory riders over to race those twins in Spain to ensure championship results.
The twin had first seen the light of day in 1958 and had been raced by Mototrans throughout the 1960s. Cashed-up Mototrans urged Ducati to build a 125cc multi-cylinder to replace Ducati’s existing twin, which used a three-camshaft design with desmodromic valve operation. Spain’s Mototrans, a Ducati affiliate, had become one of Spain’s “big three” motorcycle manufacturers, joining Montesa and Bultaco. It could so easily have been a little Italian company that started this revolution instead of the evolving giant that was Honda.įast forward to the mid-1960s.
The Japanese giant began a period where multi-cylinder 4-strokes competed against 2-strokes from both Japan and Europe.
So instead of Ducati being the first manufacturer to enter a 4-cylinder 4-stroke into the 125cc Grand Prix class, that honor fell to Honda, with the RC146 in 1963. The 125 GP during restoration at the Morbidelli museum in Pesaro, Italy. Although Ducati achieved GP wins with its 125cc single in 1958, with Ducati riders finishing second and third in the championship and the factory second in the constructors’ championship, the 125cc 4-cylinder project was dropped, and Ducati went into a kind of domestic hibernation while it concentrated on selling existing models into new export markets. To begin with, Fiat’s introduction of the affordable Fiat 500 car was crippling domestic motorcycle sales, then, at the end of 1957 Italian Grand Prix powerhouses Gilera, Moto Guzzi and Mondial announced they would withdraw from world championship racing, altering the face of Italian competition. Ducati was hoping to up the stakes with a clean-sheet design.ĭucati’s timing with its original foray into building a 125cc multi couldn’t have been worse. This showed Ducati’s clear intent to break away from production-based racing, which had set it on a path to worldwide sales success, and chase Grand Prix glory. The most significant is that it was designed purely for racing and bore no resemblance to any production Ducati. There are several fascinating aspects to the 125cc 4-cylinder. The four condensers on the outside of the points case.