RIDING THE RING-DING DUCATI

Thanks to the owner, my friend Joaquin Folch, I was able to spend an hour or so riding this restored ex-ISDT 125 Regolarità very gently off-road around his country property outside Barcelona, and in something approaching anger on the roads outside. In doing so, I registered a personal milestone by riding a Ducati two-stroke for the first time ever in a ducatista lifetime – as well as discovering that everything I’d been told about the bike being hard to ride were absolutely true! After you’ve coaxed it into life via the right-foot kickstart, and been rewarded with a spray of blue smoke from the fat Lafranconi exhaust that was a trademark of the bike even when new, the problem is the power delivery, which is worthy of a two-stroke GP