TEST
When I was invited to try the works Ducatis of the type that had been raced to four consecutive world road-racing championships in the early 1980s, life as a motorcycle journalist didn’t get much better.
It was towards the end of the 1984 season, and Tony Rutter, who had already clinched his fourth TT Formula 2 title to make it almost his own, was testing the bikes at Brands Hatch. The invitation had come from Dave Burr, manager of Tony Rutter Racing and UK importer of genuine parts from the factory, who was planning the following year to offer for sale Ducatis that would be replicas of Rutter’s title-winning bikes.
He was joined by Pat Slinn, the fabled technician who had been building and preparing Rutter’s bikes since 1981, and who I’d known from his time as the UK Ducati importer’s service manager in the 1970s. His greatest claim to fame had been that he’d helped build the TT Formula 1 world championship-winning NCR900 on which Mike Hailwood had made his famous TT comeback in 1978.
And it wouldn’t be the increasingly common racer test of the time, in which you’d be allowed a couple of laps in company with other journalists: I’d be riding the 600 TT2 and the more recently developed 750cc TT1 version, as they were being prepared for the following weekend’s Powerbike International meeting. I’d have the whole afternoon with the bikes, enabling greater insight into what had created such a successful partnership.
So, with the works Ducatis required to be in peak condition, the pressure was on me not to damage a pair of priceless thoroughbreds.
Rutter’s were examples of what many in classic circles regarded as the last ‘pure’ racing bikes to come out of the Bologna factory. Designed as complete machines by legendary engineer Dr Ing Fabio Taglioni, who retired soon after, they carried a blood line that dried up when the factory turned to liquid-cooled four-valve big bikes for Superbike racing.
The swansong of a career that had spanned the previous three decades, Taglioni’s TT2 machines encapsulated everything that had made his racers so potent, despite having to work with limited budgets.
The TT2 was the racing version of the 583cc Pantah V-twin that was first revealed as a 497cc prototype in 1977. It is estimated – the factory records have been
