DUCATS ON THE WAY TO TAGLIONI

It was a Wednesday, July 18, 2001, the day Fabio Taglioni left. Gone was a man to whom everyone who worked in Ducati owed something, even those who had not known him personally; in fact, the news aroused emotion in the company. A man who, as his wife, Norina, once recounted, began working at Ducati without drawing a salary, at least for the first few months, and who then became a leader who designed winning motorcycles on the track and in the marketplace, laying the seeds of a mentality-one could even call it an “ideology”-that there must always be a close relationship between racing and mass production. Not necessarily in that order. Thus was born – with him and thanks to him – a story intertwined between madcap racing and a fixation on products that are different from what others make, which has been adopted by all the designers and engineers who have worked (and are working) in this company that is indeed outside the ordinary in the motorcycle field. Ducati is probably the only company that enjoys autonomous cheering, in the sense that thousands of people all over the world cheer for the motorcycle and only indirectly for those who ride it. This is thanks to people in the various eras and generations who accepted the challenge of Fabio Taglioni, which was then maintained by Massimo Bordi and Gianlugi Mengoli, finally strengthened by Filippo Preziosi and Claudio Domenicali. And today the keeper of this history is Gigi Dall’Igna, who makes no secret of his fears and the pressure he had to deal with when he entered the Ducati world.

In the mythology of those July days of 2011, which mixes more or less sharp memories and more or less verifiable episodes, the adventure of the team committed to the conquest of the World Superbike title with Troy Bayliss undoubtedly stands out – and at the end of the season the mission was accomplished -. But does anyone remember an email that Livio Lodi, a proud defender of the company’s history (being the curator of the Ducati Museum) and a sincere admirer of Fabio Taglioni, sent to several colleagues: he urged them to go and write a memory or even just a kind thought on the “signature book” that he went and placed next to the entrance of the company cafeteria.

Well, the day after that impassioned exhortation, Livio Lodi received a rather emotional message in his inbox. It was Friday, when Gianluca Vignaroli, an engine engineer in the racing department, bolted up his keyboard and told of a coincidence so touching that one would think it was no coincidence at all: on the very day that Taglioni was gone forever – July 18, 2001 – the engine engineers had put the very first prototype of the V4 that would go on to equip the first MotoGP bike in Ducati’s history (the Desmosedici) on the dyno to test the operation of the “desmo” system. Lo and behold, on that very sad day, due to the death of the engineer who had developed the desmodromic system like no other on a motorcycle engine, that powerplant set rotational speeds that had never been achieved by such a mechanism.

The suggestion generated by such a coincidence, as well as the emotion aroused by the thought that Fabio Taglioni would be happy to see his beloved Desmo “turn” so high, led one to think that fate had decided to set a new course. And that is exactly how it went: 2001, particularly that summer, turned out to be an extraordinarily important season for the Emilian company.

The Superbike world title came, the first one won with Troy Bayliss, and this event was so relevant that twenty years later, that is, in July 2021, Ducati put on the market a special version of the Panigale V2 dedicated to that feat. And to that rider.

But the triumph of Bayliss and the 2001 996R also simultaneously marked a momentous transition for Ducati: the end of its exclusive commitment to Superbike. While the team was fighting in the World Championship, the MotoGP project that would debut in 2003 was beginning to take shape in Borgo Panigale. And so there is another striking coincidence: all this took place in the very year that marked the 30th anniversary of the birth of the twin-cylinder engine that Fabio Taglioni designed to equip the 500GP in 1971; the first Ducati engaged in the premier Grand Prix class, albeit with little luck.

The big news concerned the company’s decision to go and commit itself, this time with adequate economic means, to the Mondate of Prototypes, after it had always avoided the premier class in the days of the two-stroke 500. Ducati had always chosen series derivatives, thus Superbike (in the early 1970s also endurance racing) precisely because of the very close relationship between racing and series production.

So in 2001 a rather lively period began in Ducati from the point of view of design, and this inspiration produced and fueled an era of great evolution of technical concepts: from the engine that was first only and strictly two-cylinder and then became four-cylinder, to the frame that at first was only steel tube trellis and then gradually became carbon monocoque and finally aluminum double beam.