-tion trim MV Agusta's F4 Su~rbike
m~~ : ; 'i:a,~~'fir':n's re-entry info big-league racing
-
had t happen sooner or later , the question was never if, but
wen.
When what? When MY Agusta
would go racing again officially for the
first time since the day the music died in
October 1976, where, with the final race
at Brands Hatch of the legendary works
Italian four-cylinder GP bikes, the red-andsilver, open-megaphone "fire engines"
were banished from the racetrack by cruel
new noise regulations.
28
It had to happen because racing is an
even greater element of MY Agusta's
intrinsic appeal to potential customers than
it is for Ducati. What else could you expect
from the Ferrari of motorcycles, winners
of 275 GPs and 75 World Championship
titles between 1950 and 1976, and victorious in a stunning 3,028 international races
during that quarter-century of racing
supremacy on the world stage? Because
with its future now secure as a member of
the Malaysian car-making Proton conglomerate, it's now time for the historic Italian
trophy marque's management - still headed by racing nutcase but now minority
owner Claudio Castiglioni, whose Cagiva
SEPTEMBER 28, 2005 • CYCLE NEWS
factory was the only European marque in
the modern era to successfully challenge
the might of japan Inc. in SOOcc GP racing,
before morphing into today's MY Agusta
company - to make plans for a comeback
to the tracks in 2006 in the World
Superbike Championship.
In preparation for that, the MY Agusta
R&D men - headed by john Kocinski's former Cagiva 500" GP race engineer
Andrea Goggi, today the youthful head of
MY Agusta's F4 engine development - have
been building factory development motors
to be raced in the Italian Superbike series
this season by a team owned by another
illustrious name from GP racing's history
books: Roberto Gallina. Today a Yamaha,
MY Agusta - and Ducati! - main dealer in
his home town of La Spezia, Italy's naval
headquarters on the Ugurian coast, Gallina
is best known as a leading GP racer more
than 30 years ago, who then as team
owner earned back-to-back SOOcc World
titles for Suzuki with Marco Lucchinelli and
Franco Uncini before sWitching to Honda
to run an NSRSOO for a certain
Pierfrancesco Chili. (Indeed, Frankie won
his only SOOcc GP victory on a Gallina
Honda, before eventually switching to
World Superbike.) Once retired from the
GP arena, Roberto turned his talents to
four-cylinder four-strokes, developing the
Hayashi 750 by Gallina four-cylinder
Superbike for a japanese customer, of
which a dozen ended up being built.
