DUCATI HAS WON 15 WORLD SUPERBIKE TITLES since the series began in 1988. But until an Italian spring day in 1972, the Bologna factory, then owned by the Italian government, had precisely zero big-bike credentials. Ducati was instead known mainly for producing small-capacity, four-stroke singles, some with the quirky addition of desmodromic valve gear such as Mercedes-Benz had used in winning the 1954/55 Formula 1 world titles. But the late Paul Smart’s Imola 200 race victory on April 23, 1972, with Ducati teammate Bruno Spaggiari a close second, changed all that. By winning the first big-bucks 200-miler held outside the USA for the new generation of cubed-up bikes embraced by Formula 750, Smartie not only put Ducati on the map, but he also kick-started the development process, leading to today’s Panigale V4R reigning World Superbike champion.
For although Ducati’s air-cooled 750 Imola racers all had a two-valve desmodue cylinder head design with bevel-driven SOHC, they were still in every way the forerunners of the later liquid-cooled, eight-valve, twin-cam Superbikes. The new 200-mile race at Imola for 1972 was the race-winning debut of what would become Ducati’s trademark engine format: the 90-degree desmo V-twin. And for its debut race, unlike almost all its competitors in Formula 750 – the class imported from the USA which decreed that each race engine must be homologated for use on a production road bike – Ducati lifted the curtain on today’s Superbikes by equipping the Smart/Spaggiari racers with a street chassis, too. A deliberate decision it almost certainly wasn’t, but the racebike had the same heavy steel frame with Seeley-derived swingarm as fitted to its new 750cc V-twin road bikes, complete with lugs for the centrestand, rather than building a faster-steering, lightweight race chassis like the BSA/Triumph triples’ Rob North frame, or the pannier-tank John Player Norton’s lowline design.
Smart’s 1972 Imola victory, unexpected to all but Ducati itself, was achieved on a bike not so different from the 401 examples of the street-legal Imola Replica released to customers in 1974, the legendary 750SS that I and many others rode on the streets and raced at weekends back in the mid-1970s. It was a true production racer, and Ducati’s Imola win proved that racing really
