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irredeemably. They look and feel completely unsuitable for anything more than about 15 degrees of lean, and though it's possible to deck the footrests very easily without too fijO!J@ r!ll[J{}fij 11 utiJD@[J{}l1 [J{}fij VB [BBBO!Jooo much of a sense of insecurity, you can feel the tread start to move about under you if you start asking too much of the tires around the turns. The long wheelbase certainly makes it handle like a truck in tight corners (copyright: Franco Farnel), but the payoff is good stability around fast sweepers, where the surprisingly effective Ceriani suspension - on the plush side of compliant - helps to settle the bike's 600+ wet pounds over the bumps. It felt pretty good by the standards of 40 years ago. And the very springy seat helped soak up any sh ivers that got past the twin rear shocks. Really, the only thing on the Apollo apart from the heavy steering and those ludicrous tires that gave serious cause for concern were the brakes. While the matched pair of 220mm single leading-shoe drums front and rear are adequate at slow speeds for carrying a rider some wayan from his last steak dinner with baked potato and all the trimmings, they fade badly after a couple of hard stops, sending the lever back to the handlebar and making the rear brake pedal all loose and floppy. Okay, by the standards of the era they were probably the industry average - but with the performance delivered by that fantastic engine, the tires weren't the only thing that needed attention, just the one that brought an end to the Even in the face of what turned out to be an aborted attempt with the Apollo 1260, Taglioni never gave up on the idea of having a V4 wear Ducati badging. The 40-year gap between the Apollo and the 2003 advent of the 990cc MoteGP desmosedici was neatly bisected by a third, little-known but quite different Ducati V4 prototype engine - the so-called Bipantah which was finally put to death in 1963. Also known as the doppiopantah, this was conceived by Taglioni on the eve of his retirement and came much c1o.ser than many people realize to supplanting the V-twin desmoquattro project of his youthful successor and hitherto understudy, Massimo Bordi, as the basis of Ducati's future expansion in the wake of the Cagiva takeover in the mid1980s. Just ima9ine, what if Ducati had never built a fuel-injected V-twin dohc eight-valve Superbike? Drawn up under Taglioni's supervision in January, 1981, by today's head of engineering at the Bologna company, Pierluigi Mengoli, the Bipantah, as its name suggests, essentially represented a pair of the firm's existing 500cc Pantah V-twin belt-drive sohc desmodue engines twinned together to produce a 1000cc V4. Created one year before Honda stamped its mark on the V4 engine concept with the 1982 launch of the VF750S, the Bipantah was conceived as a means of allowing the company to expand its range upward, in a bid to ensure its future existence. In 1978, Ducati had passed into the hands of the Rome-based VM Group, a state-subsidized manufacturer of industrial engines for which motorcycles were a low priority, and with worldwide bike sales in a state of decline and twin-cylinder bikes unfashionable and disregarded, Ducati's future looked bleak: Fewer than 3000 bikes a year were trickling out of the Bologna factory by 1963, as it was increasingly tumed over to diesel engine production. A range of V4 models seemed the best hope of averting closure. As he explained to me personally back in 1984, when he gave me an exclusive detailed look at his final creation, this Bipantah V4 project was the pinnacle of Taglioni's lifetime in engineering and represented the fulfillment in metal of his first-ever complete engine design, the 250cc 90-degree V4 he produced in 1946 as his I.Mech.E degree project. Measuring 78 x 52mm for a capacity of 994cc, the design was the most radically oversquare of any Taglioni engine (the 500SL Pantah by contrast measured 74 x 58mm), one reason being to reduce height and length accordingly. Even so, the complete engine. weighing 215 pounds, was just four inches wider than the Pantah V-twin it was descended from, with the rear pair of vertical cylinders sharing a common block, and the two separate project, full stop. And that was literally a twowheeled tragedy, because the inability of the tire companies to come up with a product capable of harnessing the performance delivered by such a big-engined, heavy bike deprived '60s bikers of the thrills and satisfaction of riding the first of the next generation of four-cylinder sportbikes. For although Joe Berliner had the right idea in commissioning the Apollo from Ducati back in 1961, it was for what turned out to be the wrong reasons. If he hadn't quite naturally focused on the U.S. police market, with its insistence on 16-inch rubber, but had conceived the Apollo as the world's first four-cylinder sportbike with tires and handling to match, even (especially?) at the higher price that the Italian V4 would have dictated compared to the Triumph Bonneville that became the benchmark sportbike of the 1960s, the U.S. market wouldn't have had to wait another 10 years for Kawasaki to do the job properly with the arrival of the Z-I, in the wake of the CB750 Honda. After riding it, I'm convinced that the Ducati Apollo was one of the great missed opportunities of world biking, and the new desmosedici has a lot to live up lu. eN horizontal cylinders sitting outboard of them. The format provided extra room for front-wheel deflection under braking, though the differentially finned cylinders were tilted 20 degrees backward on the vertically-split crankcase, both to further reduce length and to enhance cooling of the oil/air-cooled motor - Taglioni's dislike of watercooling for themnodynamic reasons, as well as increased bulk and weight, dictated this solution. Dr. T was equally prejudiced against employing four valves per cylinder, meaning that the V4 featured two-valve cylinder heads with a single camshaft per bank of cylinders (the front one running within the horizontal metal tube connecting the pair of rocker-boxes) and was driven by a pair of toothed belts up the left side of the engine, Pantah-style. A 50-degree included valve angle - flatter than the Pantah's 60-degree heads - provided the best cylinder filling yet on a two-valve Taglioni Ducati, with electronic ignition firing a sharply offset single 12mm plug per cylinder, and four 40mm Dell'Orto carbs all facing forward and mounted on long, curved intake stubs for maximum ramair effect in those pre-airbox days. However, when I first saw the engine in early 1982, Taglioni was eagerly awaiting the arrival of an EFt system from SPICA, then suppliers of fuel Injection to the Alfa Romeo F1 team - though the project was to be canceled before this tumed up. One year later, the BMW Kl00 was introduced with the Bosch EFI that Taglioni had always wanted to employ on his bikes - he hated carburetors on the grounds that they were "inefficient, outdated and don't permit economy allied with perfomnance. Injection achieves a degree of precision no carburetor is capable of - I hope to employ it on one of my engines before I retire," he said. Sadly, he did not. The Bipantah's pistons unusually were of a two-ring desi9n in an effort to reduce friction without suffering oil blow-by problems, while the one-piece forged, nitrided plain-bearing crankshaft saw each pair of forged I-section conrods sharing a common crankpin, and there were two separate oil pumps. Power was fed via a massive large-diameter dry clutch mounted on the right side of the engine to the five-speed gearbox, which, for the first time on any Ducati, was a fully extractable cassette-type cluster, just as on today's new desmosedici. Though conceived and developed as a one-liter sportbike motor, Taglioni enVisaged the Bipantah being bored and stroked up to I 150cc if necessary for sports touring purposes or for the police market (shades of the Apollo!) and wanted a transmission capable of hamessing the extra torque and power of such an engine. But now for the big question: How much power did the V4 make in the prototype's 994cc guise? "It was the most successful engine I ever designed, almost from the very first dyno run," said Taglioni as we stood looking at it together back in 1984. "With very little tuning or development, fitted with touring camshafts and effective silencers meeting all current worldwide restrictions. it initiaUy produced 105 bhp at 9500 rpm at the rear wheel, which is the only place where power delivery counts. With more extreme cam profiles and valve timing, and open exhausts, we later discovered 132 bhp at )),000 rpm, but in this fomn there was acceptable power only from 6000 rpm upwards, whereas in the softer tune the engine would pull from 3000 rpm in top gear without a problem. Thanks to the evenly spaced firing intervals (the engine was a 360degree unit, unlike the 180-degree format of the two-up Apollo or the original MotoGP desmosedici), vibration was nonexistent. If I could have fitted fuel injection, I'd assuredly have obtained more than 150 bhp with a racing exhaust." So why was the decision taken to scrap the V4 Bipantah project at the end of 1982. after Taglioni had completed preliminary dyno testing and was in the process of wrapping a typical Ducati trellis frame around the motor, similar to the one which had won Tony Rutter his second TT F2 World Championship that year with the 600TT2? With production of complete motorcycles slumping to an all-time low, it seemed to VM management that Ducati's future lay only as an engine manufacturer, producing alongside VM's diesels a range of bike engines exclusively for Cagiva, under the contract that would be signed between them in June, 1983. There were thus two reasons for the Bipantah's demise: The first was the age-old one of cost - even with the Castiglioni brothers, who openly expressed great interest in the V4 motor, assuming a share of the R&D and startup costs, tooling up to start production was simply too major an enterprise, given the projected sales volume in a declining market. The other reason was the concurrent Japanese-driven move away from 1000cc bikes to the new generation of smaller, lighter 750cc models - and the doppiopantah would be too heavy in 750cc guise. Though BMW's directors, then about to launch the K 100, would have agreed with Taglioni when he declared that the whole point of producing motorcycles in Europe was not to copy the Japanese but to offer something distinctive and better, if more costly, the VM bureaucrats responsible for Ducatl's fortunes back then didn't share this vision. Sadly, the last of Ing. Fabio Taglioni's more than 1000 different engine designs, throughout a long and honorable career as one of the world's great motorcycle engineers, remained a stillbom monument to what might have been, if only ... cue I e n e _ s MAY 7. 2003 49