In a significant loss for Italian bike fans everywhere, legendary American Moto Guzzi tuner Dr John Wittner passed away on February 15, in his Pennsylvania home, aged 78.
Il Dottore leaving us will be felt not only in the USA, where the bikes he created were raced successfully to three AMA National titles in the 1980s by the team he established to bring Moto Guzzi to the fore again, but also in Italy, his adopted home for more than a decade. The saga of the former dentist and his various Dr John’s Guzzi racers reawakened awareness of the historic Italian brand at a time 40 years ago in the late 1980s when its profile was at its all-time lowest ebb, even among dedicated Guzzisti around the world. For the story of the Dr John’s Guzzi racers is a motorcycling fairytale which, like all such stories, finally resulted in a happy ending, with the owner of Moto Guzzi back then, the mercurial Alejandro de Tomaso, in the unlikely role of a fairy godfather…
In his spare time from dentistry Wittner had played with tuning Harley-Davidson engines, mainly for road-racing around the northeast USA. Then one day, he decided he’d like to buy a Moto Guzzi Le Mans, if for no other reason than he thought it looked neat, and also had a push-rod motor like the Harleys he was familiar with. Having trained as a mechanical engineer before he took up dentistry, Dr John also appreciated the Guzzi’s rugged engineering, and traditional looks. “I bought the bike with the sole intent of forming a team of friends to go Endurance road racing with it,” John told me in our final interview just three months before his passing. “I had worked on and ridden a number of Guzzis, and knew they were extraordinarily reliable, the perfect weapon for Endurance competition.”
So that’s how the Dr John’s Guzzi racing team was formed, which in its first year of competition won the 1984 US Endurance Championship’s Middleweight class, with a perfect 100% finishing record.
The following season, in 1985, after Wittner sold his dental practice to concentrate entirely on bike racing, the Dr John’s Guzzi team won the overall 13-race US Endurance title
