The Day Ducati Put Super into Superbike
March 1987. Daytona, Florida. Home of the prestigious Daytona 200 Superbike race where future 3 time 500GP World Champion Wayne Rainey took victory for Honda. Something important though was happening in one of the support classes. A prototype from a small, Italian manufacturer ridden by a former 500GP champ cleaned up the Battle of the Twins class and lapped so fast, it would have qualified 6th for the Superbike race. The prototype wasn’t much to look at but the Ducati 851 would soon change the face of Superbike racing.
1981 World 500GP champion, Marco Lucchinelli, hit 165mph on the banking that day with a Ducati twin that produced 120bhp at the rear wheel. Remember this was in 1987!! Ducati were probably not too surprised but everyone else sure was. The buzz on the day from those who were there was just what was powering that bellowing twin to such speed around the banking.
Ducati had fielded a 748cc version of the same bike in the Bol d’Or 24 hour endurance race just six months earlier. The hurriedly cobbled together prototype featured new liquid cooled, 4-valve desmodromic heads mounted on modified Pantah crankcases. The engine was shoe horned into a 750F1 frame. The resultant bike wasn’t pretty but it was fast enough for Lucchinelli and co-riders to get up to 7th place before retiring with a broken con-rod.
Such was the birth of the mighty Desmoquattro engine which would go on essentially fundamentally unchanged until the Ducati 998 of 2001 when the testastretta was unveiled.
In 1986 the Cagiva was running Ducati and the Castiglionis wanted to develop a more modern engine. Ing. Massimo Bordi was given the assignment. He seemed such an obvious choice since his mechanical engineering thesis was on 4-valve cylinder heads with desmodromic valve activation. It is true that Cosworth were consulted but they wanted nothing to do with desmo valves and so Bordi himself had to do much of the development work.
In addition to 4 valves and liquid cooling, features which of course were now de rigeur with competitive Japanese machines, the 851 feautured computerized electronic fuel injection. Derived from Formula 1 cars, the Weber Marelli system was very sophisticated for a motorcycle at a time when almost everyone else was using carburetors.
This new bike came along just at the right time. The brand new World Superbike Championship was due to kick off in 1988. Ducati needed to build 200 road bikes for the model to be homologated to compete with 750cc, 4 cylinder machines in the series. A prototype was shown in 1987 and it looked like a racer with lights because it mostly was!
With Lucky still at the controls, Ducati had a dream debut beating Honda’s RC30 and Bimota’s injected Yamaha FZ750 powered YB4 to victory in the first round of the series at Donington Park, England. The dream didn’t last long though. A series of crankcase and electrical problems plagued the bike, but when it ran, it was fast. Ducati decided to save their money and work on the bike for the 1989 season and elected to skip the final two rounds in Australia and New Zealand.
It was a pity. Ducati likely could have won the title if they had only made the investment to travel. I remember watching as series leader, Davide Tardozzi (yes that one), fell off his Bimota on the warm-up lap and the first ever World Superbike championship ended up going to Honda’s Fred Merkel. Ducati’s turn came in 1990 when Frenchman Raymond Roche claimed the crown. He started a period of Ducati dominance in Superbike racing that lasted 20 years and created Ducati heros like Roche, Polen, Falappa, Fogarty and Bayliss. It all began with the Ducati 851.
Source: ‘The Ducati Story’ by Ian Falloon
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