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Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127740
when the gearbox jumped out of gear, sending the revs soaring and resulting in bent valves. It was a cruel disappointment. This was one of the Paton's biggest weaknesses, only eventually cured by sourcing new gear pinions from a French manufacturer. Once this was done, the Paton proved both fast and reliable. The result was a third-place finish in the Spanish GP at Jerez, third again in the round-the-houses street race at Gandia, also in southern Spain, then in the 1987 Dutch Historic IT at Assen, run as a support race to the Dutch GP. It was then decided to tackle the isLe of Man IT course by entering the bike in the Classic Manx GP; it ran like clockwork in practice, lapped at 95 mph and took me to eighth pLace after losing a minute at the push start when it refused at first to fire up, until Maurice was allowed to push me. The very short 1280mm wheelba e, on a bike that had started life as a 250, (Right) Quadruple-leading-shoe Fontana drum brake was state of the art in the mid'60s. Forks are by Cerlanl and the wheels by Borranl. (Far right) The Paton started life as a 250cc machine, but was enlarged to 350 then 488cc. The free-revving, twln-cam four-stroke parallel twin Is mated to a 6speed extractable gearbox with a dry clutch. Fast forward ew men have ever dedicated their entire lives SO totally to the cause of motorcycle racing as Italian hyperenthusiast Giuseppe Pattoni (center). A former sidecar racer who was chief mechanic for the Mondial team which won both 125 and 250cc world championships in 1957, and especially responsible for 250 champion Cecil Sandford's single-cylinder OOHC machine, Pattoni struck off on his own at the end of that season when Mandial, in common with Gilera and Moto Guzzi, retired from racing. Ever since then, Pattoni has remained involved in Grand Prix motorcycle racing with machines of his own manufacture, a literally incredible record of quixotic struggle against the odds. In the modem era of GP racing, when budgets are measured in millions of dollars or billions of lire, Pattoni and his equally dedicated son Roberto provide a constant reminder of the modern ultra-commercial road racing world's link with its past, when a host of small companies and home constructors, epitomised by the uniquely Italian concept of la moto artigianale, pitted their shoestring skills against the major manufacturers. Their joint creation, the 500 Paton, continues to line up on GP grids against the mega-yen creations of Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha, proving that the age of the little man in GP racing is not dead - yet. The machine has even ended up in the points, as Paton rider Jean-Pierre Jeandat took it to 15th in the German GP at Nurburgring this past May. As a whimsical tale of more than three decades of unbroken endeavour, the history of the Paton in GP racing has no equal. The first Paton appeared in 1958, and was the fruit of a collaboration between Pattoni and Unto Tonti, a former Mondial technician who later found fame as the inspiration behind Moto Guzzi's V-twin pushrod road bikes. So-called by combining the first couple of letters of their surnames (Pa-Ton), this initial design was in fact a 175cc Mondial fitted with a Tonti-designed DOHC cylinder head to replace the standard single cam top end. Soon after, a similar transformation took place on a 125cc version and the eighth-liter bike achieved some reknown by Launching none other than Mike Hailwood on the path to success in the Isle of Man TT, when he rode it F into seventh place in his first race on the Island, the 1958 125 IT. The following season, the first tWin-cylinder Paton appeared at the Italian GP at Monza, a 250cc machine ridden by Giampiero Zubani based on a design Tonti had drawn up two years beforehand for Mondia!, but had never been built. The powerpLant had a massive dohc cylinder head with gear drive up the center of the 25-degree-inclined cylinders; the resultant engine was very bulky and suspended in a messy-looking trellis frame. The bike was not a success, and the partnership in any case dissolved soon after when Tonti was offered a job by Bianchi to design a trio of new twin-cylinder GP racers for them. This left Pattoni on his own, and after a couple of years spent building up capital working for a leading Italian car racer, Giorgio Pianta, he built an all-new 250 twin which debuted at the end of 1963, and was ridden the following season by Alberto Pagani in various GPs, netting a remarkable, if fortunate, third place in the Isle of Man IT. This established the format for all future four-stroke Patons, with heavily-finned, vertical cylinders, gear-driven dohc, unit-eonstruction six-speed gearbox with gear primary drive and wet-sump lubrication in typically Italian fashion by means of a long finned sump under the engine. The 250 in tum gave birth to a 350cc version which debuted at Vallelunga in 1965 in the hands of Gile!berto Parlotti, then found its way to Britain where it was owned briefly by Mike Duff, before being bought by Liverpool car dealer Bill Hannah for his sponsored rider, Fred Stevens, to race. This was the start of Pattoni's most fruitful period, for Hannah was so impressed by the performance of the 350 twin that he encouraged Pattoni to build a 500 version, which duly appeared in the spring of '66 in Stevens' hands. Both machines had a very compact build with a mere 1280mm wheelbase, making the handling very lively over bumpy surfaces but also giving acceptably fast handling for a twin. In the hands of Stevens, then after his retirement, Billy Nelson, the Hannah-Patons were leading contenders for the honor of first privateer home in late-'60s GPs, with a superior turn of speed to the British singles which were their main rivals, and infinitely better engineered and more reliable than the concurrent Linto. Had those privateers who were unfortunate enough to have their fingers burnt by buying a Unto settled for a Paton instead, it's probable that they would have enjoyed much greater success. But Pattoni was never the most commercially minded person and though he built and sold a total of ten four-stroke twins over a period of time, these were all effectively hand-built machines constructed by him and his colleague Gian80 milio Marchesini. The high points of the Patons' career were Fred Stevens' remarkable double in the 1967 North West 200 in Ireland, when he won both 350 and 500cc classes on the Hannah-Patons, while the same year Angelo Bergamonti won the Italian 500cc title on Pattoni's own bike. In due course an eight-valve version of the ultimate 73.5 x 57.5mm, 48&c Paton twin, which in two-valve form delivered an honest 58 bhp at the rear wheel by 1969, was developed. This extended the lifetime of the hand-built twin another few years, Roberto Gallina and later Virginio Ferrari obtaining leaderboard results with the machine well into the mid70s. But unlike so many of his contemp rari s, Pattoni was able to move with the times, and in J 7 Ferrari debuted a new V-four, two-stroke Paton, a si gl8o' an design with the outer cylinders pointing at 90 egrees to the inner pair. Years later, Honda paid him the supreme compliment of copying the same highly unusual Layout for their first NSRSOO V-four two-stroke. Imitation is always the sincerest form of flattery.