PEOPLE
For four decades from 1958 until he passed away in 1999, aged 72, Grand Prix race mechanic Giuseppe Pattoni dedicated his life to constructing the distinctive green Paton road racers.
‘Peppino’, or ‘Pep’ as he was known, would often work long hours into the night in his small workshop in Milan to craft them practically single-handedly for a select roster of customers, as well as his own race team – latterly with the help of his son, Roberto.
During a long and eventful life Pattoni earned the respect and admiration of cognoscenti around the globe as a man filled with a lasting passion for bike racing – one who at the cost of untold sacrifice and against all odds, made an improbable dream come true. The dream: competing in 500cc Grand Prix racing from 1966 onwards right up until his death, against the might of factories with literally a million times his resources, with bikes he’d constructed himself with his own hands. If ever there was a latter-day Don Quixote of motorcycling, it was Giuseppe Pattoni, creator of the Patons.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, a mere dozen of the Italian DOHC 500cc parallel-twins were built, whose high-revving motor with 180-degree crankshaft (so, one up, one down, piston-wise) delivered a distinctive exhaust note that sounded both muscular, yet high-pitched – ‘a castrated Casanova’ of a race-bike engine, as one Latin journalist described it back then! In due course, Pattoni followed the tide and switched to building two-stroke GP bikes, again entirely creating both engine and chassis to his own design, leaving his Swinging Sixties four-stroke Paton Bicilindrica racers to compete in the fast-growing world of historic racing, with great success.
The first Paton – pronounced as spelt, so Pah-ton,
