Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

MV Agusta 350 Tre Cilindri Racer Test D7]@]DD@][JiJ [jj]@][;f)7]@[f[fJD@@@. When the incipient Grand Prix Hall of Fame is expanded to include machines, as well as the men who rode them, there'll be many contenders for the title of Racebike of the Century. But few will possess such strong credentials for that honor as the MV Agusta Tre Cilindri which was responsible for Giacomo Agostini winning 13 of his 15 world titles between 1966 and 1973, in both 350cc and 500cc guise. For the MV-3 is a motorcycle with such strong charisma even today that, more than a quarter century after its last GP race, it's still revered as the benchmark bike of the golden age of four-stroke Grand Prix racing - the greatest of the great. It's doubly ironic, therefore, that the Tre Cilindri should have been conceived by none other than Count Domenico Agusta himself as a vehicle to achieve his ultimate sporting ambition - to make an Italian rider World Champion in the 350 and 500cc GP classes, on one of his machines. For while Carlo Ubbiali had proved well able to fly the 'tricolore' flag for MV Agusta on the smaller 125 and .250cc bikes, in order to achieve GP success in the more prestigious largercapacity classes Count Domenico had had to employ the services of 'Anglos' like John Surtees, Gary Hocking and Mike HaHwood, who by 1964 was MV's sole rider in the 500cc category on a powerful but heavy four-cylinder machine which, technically speaking, was a child of the 1950s rather than the '60s, based as it was on the original MV-4 designed by Pietro Remor. Indeed, its sleeved-down 350cc sister - bulky and overweight as a small-scale 500 must inevitably be - was quite incapable of matching the performance of Honda's own four, which in effect wa.s a scaled-up version of Jim Redman's title-winning 250. MV only competed in the 350cc class spasmodically, at circuits on which Count Agusta felt the four would not be too disadvantaged, which meant that in three full seasons from 1962-64, Hailwood won only a total of three GPs - one each at the Isle of Man, Finland and East Germany - against 18 victories for the Redman/Honda duo, en route to a hat-trick of World Championships. Indeed, Hailwood was even allowed to switch to an overbored M2 two-stroke to finish runner-up to Redman's 350 Honda in the last GP of the '64 season, in Japan! But in some secrecy, Count Agusta had already taken steps to reverse the Japanese 350cc supremacy, by taking a leaf from their 'good little 'un' policy and commissioning his race team, headed by Arturo Magni, to develop a three-cylinder contender based on the twin-cylinder 250 with which Ubbiali and Hocking had dominated the class in 1959-60. Indeed, Hocking had even won the 1960 350cc French GP on the switchback Clermont-Ferrand circuit aboard a boredout 280cc version of the twin, comfortably beating teammate Surtees' four-cylinder full-350cc MV in the process. With no minimum weight limits to worry about in those days, Count Agusta reasoned that a compact, slim and light 350 triple comprising the 250 twin with an extra cylinder stuck on the end, would be hard to beat. Destiny was to prove him right. Work began on the three-cylinder engine design in May 1964, initially with the two-valve 250 as the basis until Count Agusta came into the workshop one evening when the engine was apart, saw the inside of the cylinder head, and immediately told Magni to throw it away - he wanted a modem, four-valve engine! Fifteen days later - an indication of the speed that MV could work at, thanks to the amenities of the Agusta aircraft company in which they were based - the new 12-valve DOHC cylinder head had been designed, cast, machined and assembled, ready for its first dyno tests. By August of that year the team had a complete bike - prod4.ced lit the peak of the GP season, be It noted, in between ushering Heilwood to his third (of four) 500cc world title - but by now Count Agusas was on holiday lit the Venice Udo, though inevitably impotient to see and hear the new bike running. Accordingly, the prototype WllS loaded into a small van and taken for a clay trip to the Adriatic coast, where one of the mechanics rode it up and down the Mestre-Venice highway to demonstrate It to Count Domenico - on open exhausts, with a Prova license plate hung on the back! Only In italy. Satisfied with his team's work, Count Agusta decided there and then that the small-scale MV-3 required a rider used to racing smaller-capacity bikes, and that this man should be Italian. Top of the list of candidlltes was the newlycrowned Italian 250cc Champion - 22-year old Giacomo Agostini, who had won his crown on the Morini single by defeating the bike's previous rider, Tarquinio Provini, on the four-cylinder Benelli, and had moreover twice finisl:led fourth on his two 1964 GP appearances in Germany and at Monza on the slim single, after unmercifully harrying the faster fours. Agostini was thus signed up to ride alongside Hailwood for MV Agusta in 1965, though development testing on the new 350 triple thllt winter was restricted to the dyno, as the team restarted R&D work on the 500 four which had remained essentiaUy unchanged for the past three seasons. 18 OCTOBER 17, 2001 • 0: U D •• n _ Incredible as it may seem, the first time the new triple ever ran on a racetrack was in practice for the opening GP of the 1965 season at the Nurburgring, with one bike each for Hailwood and Agostini. The fact that both triples broke the oil pump drive in practice was perhaps only to be expected, in view of their lack of pre-race testing - but significantly, it was Ago's bike the MV mechanics concentrated on repairing, leaving Mike to start the 350 race with an older four. For the first eight laps of the race, Agostini sat behind World Champion Redman's Honda, before sweeping past and pulling away on the MV triple. Redman crashed trying to keep up and Ago cruised home to give the MV-3 a dream debut victory, no less than two-and-a-half minutes ahead of runner-up Heilwood aboard the four-cylinder MV whose day was now thoroughly done. Count Agusta had been right. Honda and Redman fought back against their new rival by winning the next four GP races - including the IT where Ago finished third behind Read's overbored Yamaha on his Isle of Man debut, after Hailwood had led the first three laps of his own first race aboard the MV-3, before retiring with mechanical problems, after pitting with a badly stretched chain. In Redman's absence, Ago won at Imatra and Monza, which left everything hanging on the final round at Honda's home track of Suzuka, where Ago on the MV-3 was heading for victory, and the world title for the triple in its debut season, when the engine faltered, and after a long pitstop he limped home in fifth place. Teammate Hallwood, who had already announced he was rejoining Honda the following season, took over the lead and scored victory in his last race for MV Agusta, ahead of about-to-be teammate Jim Redman, who narrowly won his fourth and final 350cc World title by fmishing second. his bike: Ago and the MY Agusta. For the 1966 season, Honda had the 297cc version of their six-cylinder machine ready for Hailwood and Redman to ride in the 350 GPs, and the all-new RC181 four developed for an assault on the 500cc title. At the end of the season, overall honors were even, with Hallwood winning six GPs to Ago's three (Including his maiden race victory in the Isle of Man TT) to take the World Championship in the 350cc class, as well as completing the season undefeated to win the 250 title on the smaller six, too. But Ago took sweet revenge in the SOOcc class, achieving Count Agusta's ambition to see an MV-mounted Italian World Champion in the blue riband category - and after riding the old 500 four in the early races, he did so on a three-cylinder bike which first appeared in practice at Assen, then was progressively enhanced in capacity from the original 350cc to 377cc, then 420cc, and by the end of the season from Sachsenrlng onward, to 470cc. By winning the final race of the season at Monza. where the Honda's engine blew up after a vivid tussle for victory with the MV-3, Ago took his and the triple's first world title the first of many. Ironically, the MV-3 never succeeded in winning the 350cc world crown it was originally designed to secure in a .... straight fight with Honda before the Japanese company retired from racing at the end of 1967, opening the way to a succession of Ago/MV-3 world crowns. For that final year, Hailwood and the 297cc six again had the upper hand, winning the title once more after scooping victory in the first five races on the trot, before leaving Ago to score just a single consolation win in the Ulster. But the tire was on the other wheel in the 500cc class, where in spite of a series of titanic battles resulting in victory honors being shared five-each between the two 'best of enemies' - whose most dramatic confrontation was in the Senior IT, still regarded by many as the finest race ever witnessed on the Isle of Man, where after swapping the lead several times at record-breaking speed, the MV's chain cruelly broke on the penultimate lap - Agostini and the MV-3 (now uprated to a full 498cc) succeeded in once again denying Honda the prized 500cc world crown. The Italian GP at Monza should have brought Honda the title, with Hallwood firmly in the lead two laps from the finish, more than half a lap ahead of Ago and the MY Agusta, when the Japanese bike stuck in fourth gear, leaving Mike to crawl to the finish - but in second place. It would take a two-stroke to eam the 500cc world crown for the Japanese firm, oneand-a-half decades later. Honda's retirement from racing - and Hailwood's, from GP events, as he picked up the threads of a car racing career left the way open for half a decade of MV Agusta/Agostini domination of the 350cc and 500cc categories by the threecylinder duo. By way of illustration, Ago won all 17 GP races held for these two classes in 1968, en route to a pair of world titles, following up with 18 wins in 1969, and 19 victories in 1970 - the year after he bought one of the first three-cylinder Triumph Tridents to arrive in Italy, on the grounds that "it's a bike I like riding with on the street, because the engine responds in the same way as my MV-3's"! Further double-up world titles followed in 1971/72 - though it was in this latter year that the first signs of cracks in the MV-3's supremacy began to appear, with the potent threat posed by Jarno Saarinen's Yamaha, Until then, the Grand Prix supremacy of man and machine had became taken for granted, and even brave but essentially unfocused - and always under-budgeted - attempts from the likes of Benelli, Unto and Paton to dislodge the duo proved hopeless. But that only underlined the excellence of the MV Agusta Tre Cilindri - a bike aboard which Ago felt so competeJy at home that he resisted every attempt to persuade him to adapt to the new 16-valve 350cc and then 500cc four-cylinder bikes which MV Agusta brought on line in 1972, to counter the increasing threat from the Japanese two-strokes in both classes, and which owed much more to the existing triple in terms of concept and design, rather than to the old-generation Remor-designed fours. But eventually Ago was pried away from the triple though not before Phil Read was brought on board to support him midway through 1972, and himself took the 500cc crown the year after, in his first full season on an MV-3. After Saarinen's tragic death at Monza early in the season removed the most potent threat to MV supremacy, the team stopped racing the new four-cylinder bikes and focused exclusively on the established triples, still more than capable of dealing with the phalanox of privateers. Ago's roll call of MV Agusta-mounted GP victories reaching 108 wins, most of them on triples. as he clinched the 350cc world title that year, for a record sixth time in succession. But it was, ironically, Read's victory in the season-ending Spanish GP at Jarama that marked the MV Agusta Tre Cilindri's final World Championship race victory, in a nine-year career at the top of the class. It was moreover the end of an era, with Agostini claiming to no longer feel at home in the MV Agusta team rubbing shoulders for supremacy with his prickly British teammate. After nine years in which the names of Ago and MV had become as one in the minds of race fans aU over the world, the Italian star decamped to Yamaha for the 1974 season - a year in which MV's participation in the 350cc category WllS Jettisoned in order to concentrate on the 500cc class with the new four, with Read and new recruit Gianfranco Bonera as riders. At the start of 1974, Bonera had his first race for MV in the italian Championship round lit lrnola, fmishing third on a triple behind teammate Read, the victor on a four-cylinder bike, and second-placed Agostini on his Yamaha. It was the last time a three-cylinder MV Agusta took part in a race while the factory team WllS still competing, and It took another two decades for Team Obsolete to retum one 01 the most illustrious racing motorcycle designs ever built to the race track, to be used in anger by the man whose factory Honda it was originally designed to defeat - Jim Redman, Ironically, while his Historic race victory at Daytona in 1995 was indeed the flfSt time the former Rhodesian rider had ever raced an MV Agusta, it nearly wasn't. For it can now be revealed thllt-in 1969, after three years of retirement in the wake of the Injuries sustained in his crash in the 1966 Belgian GP at Spa aboard the ill-handling 500cc Honda four, Redman had reached an agreement with Count Agusta to make a comeback by riding an MV-3 alongside his erstwhile rival, Agostini, in that year's Senior IT in the Isle of Man. But his entry arrived one day after the closing date stipulated by the ACU - who promptly refused to accept it! What might have been.

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