Where legends live on..

1972 MV Agusta F750 Imola

For over a quarter of a century MV Agusta enjoyed an amazing record in racing; winning 275 World Championship GPs, 75 World titles, and a total of 3028 races, until the day the music died in October 1976, when a factory MV raced for the last time.
It was the end of an era, which could be set to be reborn in 2012, with the arrival of the radial-valve F4 in World Superbike competition, and the debut of the new F3 675cc three-cylinder Supersport contender, after MV Agusta was recently reacquired from Harley-Davidson by previous owner Claudio Castiglioni. And former Ducati technical guru Massimo Bordi, creator of the serial World Superbike title-winning Desmoquattro V-twins, has been installed as CEO.

In more ways than one MV Agusta’s planned return to the racetrack will rekindle the fires of competition with the marque’s fellow-Italian rivals Ducati, which were first stoked exactly four decades earlier, in 1972, with the successful debut of the Desmo V-twins in the Imola 200, one of the world’s iconic races, which is celebrated each October with a 200 Miglia di Imola Revival event, the first edition of which was staged so successfully last October.

Grand Prix to Super Bike

Although MV’s illustrious reputation was built on the back of unparalleled success in Grand Prix racing, team patron, Count Domenico Agusta, never countenanced the idea of taking part in street bike-based racing. But, after his death in 1971, his brother Corrado did permit himself a single such attempt, aimed at promoting the marque’s newly released shaft-drive 750 Sport, the first-ever four-cylinder European sportbike.
This came about in 1972, when a solitary works MV Agusta 750 was raced by reigning 500GP World Champion Giacomo Agostini in the first-ever Imola 200-miler – the race that brought Ducati to prominence as a big-bike manufacturer, with the one-two domination of Victory Lane by Paul Smart and Bruno Spaggiari on their Desmo V-twins.

In fact, MV constructed two bikes for this race, one of which completed just nine laps in practice in the hands of Ago’s teammate Alberto Pagani, before being consigned to the back of the team van, leaving Ago to face the challenge of no less than 22 other factory-entered race machines.

After half a decade as the unchallenged king of Grand Prix racing on the three-cylinder MV ‘fire engines’, Ago found himself in an unaccustomed fourth place on the grid for the race, behind pole man Bruno Spaggiari and his teammate, Paul Smart, on the deceptively fleet new Ducatis, and Dave Simmonds' surprising 508cc Kawasaki, an overbored H1R 500GP two-stroke triple, which in the end failed to start thanks to piston trouble.

The fact that Ago and the MV were there at all was a minor miracle, since Count Agusta had only decided to build a pair of bikes for the race just 25 days beforehand. With up to 27 people working on the machines somehow they both appeared at Imola in time for qualifying, clad in an unaccustomed MV livery of red and white, rather than the more usual red and silver.

Inevitably, with such a last-minute rush, there had been no time for anything other than the briefest of shakedown runs on the Modena airport, and after the first day of practice both bikes were well off the pace, Ago three seconds slower than Smart's Ducati, and Pagani well out of touch over six seconds down. The sensible decision was made to concentrate on Agostini's mount, leaving Pagani on the sidelines, which brought some improvement in final qualifying, so that Ago at least started from the front row of the grid. Anything else would have been unthinkable, leading many to wonder if maybe the times had been massaged.

Race on

When the flag fell on the 'Daytona of Europe', as the first major European race for the America-derived Formula 750 class was termed, Agostini showed how unworthy those thoughts had been, even if, as Paul Smart noted later, he might have had a bit of an advantage. "Ago was riding a shaft-driven works MV," said Paul, "and though there were lots of smiles, he was taking it very seriously, just as he always did, especially being on home ground, where I suppose it must have been the first time he wasn't on pole for a race there in more than five years.

“Anyway, the start was absolutely typical for Italy, as soon as Ago started, then they dropped the flag for the rest of us! That meant he led off the line, and in fact he hung on in front for the first few laps. The MV was very fast, but smoked a lot till he eventually pulled off (after 42 of the 62 laps), and it also weaved like mad down the straights. Ago was a bloody hero to hold on to it with the throttle wide open.”

After scorching off the line from the clutch start, the Italian ace took an immediate lead on the underdeveloped MV over the two Ducatis, which by dint of digging deep into his resources of skill and talent, he managed to hold for the first five laps of the race. It was only delaying the inevitable, though, at the end of the fifth lap Paul Smart gave Ducati a long-awaited moment of glory when he passed Ago and the MV on top speed past the pits, in full view of a good part of the massive 70,000 crowd.

A lap later, and Spaggiari was past too, but Ago wasn't finished. Though down on speed and on a bike that was a visible handful round the fast sweepers then abounding at pre-chicane Imola, he clung on to the two silver V-twins, so that by lap 40 out of the 64, he was still only eight seconds behind the two leaders, who were circulating together, and well ahead of the rest of the field, led by Walter Villa and Percy Tait on Triumph triples.

Ago's almost superhuman effort was in vain, as the MV began to slow, and started smoking increasingly from one of its four long, gracefully tapering megaphones. What was later announced to be 'valve trouble' (it turned out afterwards that a retaining screw holding one of the camshafts in place had broken) eventually caused him to pull in and retire with only 20 laps left to be run, leaving Smart to pip teammate Spaggiari for victory in the richest race run to date in Europe. It was a day to remember for Ducatisti – then, as now.

MV professed not to be downhearted, though: "We didn't come to Imola to win," stated MV’s Managing Director Pietro Bertola after the race, "simply to show our sportsmanship by taking part, and to gain experience. This class of racing is new to us, but before long I promise you we too will be competitive."

That promise was never fulfilled, although some major modifications were made to Agostini's bike with the intention of competing in further F750 races in Europe and the USA, all with the aim of promoting sales of the 750 Sport road bike.

The chief problem was the AMA's claiming rule, which had permitted an American club racer to buy John Cooper's works BSA-3 for the paltry sum of just over £1000 after he'd won the Ontario 200 in California. MV had no intention of racing in the USA until that rule was rescinded, but then plans for the F750 Imola bike to compete in Europe also dimmed, when the hitherto all-conquering Italian team came under severe pressure from Yamaha and the great Jarno Saarinen in 500 GPs. In the end, MV elected to try to stay on top in Grand Prix racing, and the F750 bike never saw the track again. Well not until 1986, that is.

Imola MV reborn and ridden

Among the fleet of factory MV Agusta racers acquired by New York's Team Obsolete from Gruppo Agusta, in the autumn of 1986, was none other than Agostini's F750 Imola bike. It became the first of the more than a dozen machines, forming the subject of the two-wheeled sale of the century, to be restored by Italian 500 GP team owner Roberto Gallina and his men to pristine, track-ready condition on behalf of its American owners.

It had been intended that the bike should be raced by Team Obsolete's lead rider Dave Roper in the F750 Vintage race at Daytona in March ’87, but in the end time ran out, and Roper raced the team's ex-Dick Mann Daytona 200-winning BSA-3 there instead. He still won!

Which is how I came to be fortunate enough to be offered the task of helping set up the freshly restored bike on a cold morning at Misano in December 1986, by taking over the role of 'factory' tester from Roberto Gallina himself, when he left to fly to Japan to cement his 1987 500GP deal with Honda – a deal that’d place his rider Frankie Chili in the seat of a V4 NSR500, and in due course to take the chequered flag first at the very same track two years later, to record his only 500GP victory, in controversial circumstances.

Forty laps later, punctuated by countless visits to the pits for adjustments by Team Gallina mechanics, not only was the MV Agusta at last running more or less properly, but I’d formed a new appreciation of Ago's skill and bravery, as well as his achievement in hanging on so closely to those two lean, lazy-handling, but fast and stable Ducatis that Imola day 14 years earlier. Sometimes a rider's most meritorious performances are put up in races he doesn't actually win. For Agostini, the 1972 Imola 200 was just such an instance, and here's why.

With only 25 days in which to build two bikes and race-prepare them for Imola, MV Agusta’s chief mechanic Arturo Magni and his men inevitably had to base their F750 racer pretty closely on the road bike from which it was derived. This meant that Ago's race bike had the dubious benefit of shaft final drive and the standard road gearbox, though to mitigate the less than ideal handling a new chassis and beefed-up swingarm had been built.

Drum brakes were fitted front and rear, including a rather undersized 230mm Ceriani 4LS front drum and 200mm rear borrowed from the three-cylinder GP bike – but now asked to stop a 190kg 750cc four from a top speed of around 240kph, instead of a 126kg 500cc triple!

After the race, when the ill-effects of the shaft drive had been obvious for all to see, let alone for Ago to experience, Magni designed a chain-drive conversion for the machine, which later came to form the basis of the aftermarket kit he sold successfully for many years under his own name to MV street bike owners, after the factory race team closed in 1976 and he began making his own Magni motorcycles.
This evoluzione bike was tested by Pagani at Misano, by which time it had also been fitted with a pair of 280mm Scarab front disc brakes which, together with the reduction in weight to 184kg by elimination of the heavy shaft drive package, allowed him to lap a massive four seconds faster than with the shaftie! But because of the F750 claiming rule in force in the USA, and the need to focus all his team’s resources on stemming the tide of two-stroke dominance, Count Agusta eventually cancelled the project, and the bikes were stored away under a tarpaulin in the rear of the team’s Cascina Costa base.

The heart of the evoluzione

After the Evoluzione Imola racer came into Team Obsolete’s possession Roberto Gallina's men rebuilt the lightly modified roadster-based engine. Like the GP racers it was derived from, this had central gear drive to the twin overhead camshafts, but unlike them featured a one-piece cylinder block mounted on die-cast production crankcases, topped by a similarly-made cylinder head fitted with special race camshafts.

Although street MVs of the era had their cylinders cast separately, F750 rules allowed this kind of change. With a two-degree narrower valve angle, factory race team records show intake valve sizes were increased from 30 to 34mm and exhausts from 28 to 29mm (only one each per cylinder, remember), and valve lift raised from 8.5 to 9.0mm, with a resultant increase in horsepower from 69bhp at 8500rpm on the street 750 four, to 85bhp at 10,400rpm on the F750 racer, with the aid of an open exhaust system with four tapering megaphones, and a compression ratio raised from 9:1 to 10.8:1.

The MV road bike's ignition system was employed, with a car-type distributor located behind the cylinders and bevel-driven off the crank via a spur gear, but this necessitated the rare sight of a factory MV racer carrying a battery mounted behind the distributor.

Like the road bike, the F750 race engine was a wet sump design, carrying three litres of oil in the wide reservoir beneath the engine, which protruded through the bottom of the fairing for cooling. Surprisingly, no oil cooler was fitted, though I bet if they'd raced the bike anywhere hotter than springtime in Imola, they'd have needed one.
Post-Imola modifications to the engine apparently included fitting a specially made close-ratio gearbox, to match the chain drive conversion, but I'm sorry to say the outcome wasn’t a happy one. The heavy gear change wasn’t at all pleasant to use, and thanks to its stiff action using the right foot, one up gear lever was a penance rather than a pleasure.

Unlike on the four-cylinder MV Agusta GP bikes I was also riding at Misano that same day, I found I absolutely had to use the clutch to change up, otherwise the engaging dogs would baulk and I’d end up missing a gear. But even using the clutch, the change was still very slow and mechanical; I could actually feel the pinions meshing, rather like a period BMW Boxer or Moto Guzzi's notoriously clunky change.
This in turn affected my opinion of the engine's character, since with such a slow change even the road-based engine, fitted with a stock roller-bearing crankshaft (with four roller and two ball main bearings) that seemed not to have been lightened, had a hard time keeping its revs up. This increased the already wide gap between gear ratios, exposing the engine's peaky nature, thanks to the racing camshafts installed.

The engine came on song at 6000rpm, with a 10,000rpm redline on the unusual black-faced Veglia revcounter. If I let the revs drop below six grand, the engine wouldn’t carburate and I’d have to clutch it to get the motor back in the power band, so with an average drop of 2500rpm between gears, I really had to rev it to the limit to make it drive hard. Yet if I tried to snatch the gear or rush the change, I’d miss a gear.
What the engine badly needed was a six-speed gearbox, but under contemporary Formula 750 regulations, you couldn’t change the number of ratios from the donor street bike. With the ten grand rev limit evidently chosen in pursuit of making the engine last 200 miles, short of the 10,400rpm power peak, there was all the more need for an extra ratio.

An extra difficulty on what was a very hard bike to ride for any length of time was the steep power curve, combined with what appeared to be a maximum torque output very close to the rpm at which maximum power was delivered. It was all the more vital, too, for the team to ensure that carburetion was spot on, so that the engine revved as freely as it should; it took half a dozen visits to the Misano pits on our test day before the needle would hit ten grand on the tacho dial, and the 29mm Dell'Orto carbs, bored out to 30mm, were unusually sensitive to slight jetting changes. Just going up or down one point, or altering the needle a notch either way, made a significant difference.

High, wide and handsome?

All this might not have mattered so much if the bike had handled as well as its 350cc and 500cc stablemates, but it didn't. The four wide-set, gently tapering exhausts gave the F750 MV Agusta a bulky impression that was reinforced by sitting on it. The Imola MV felt as big and brutal as its CR750 Honda rival of the day, and handled about as well, which was – not very!

It seemed a bike full of contradictions; it felt big, yet cramped. Ago's quite a bit shorter than me, but the controls and footrests seemed to be in the wrong place relative to one other, in a way that they certainly didn't on the 500GP MV four I was riding the same day. And it did feel very wide, in fact while riding the bike it seemed half as wide again as the more svelte 500 four.

The wheelbase of the specially built chassis was incredibly short for a 750, just 1340mm, shorter than many 250s, and surely a recipe for ultra-quick steering. It did lay into corners like an MV Agusta should (though the combination of an elderly front Dunlop triangular and a high-profile Michelin rear of similar vintage hardly inspired confidence), and it steered pretty neutrally in Misano's several second gear horseshoes. But try to take it through a fast sweeper with the power on and it lured you irresistibly towards the outside of the corner with an improbable degree of under steer. Not an easy bike to tackle Imola’s fast sweepers on, believe me.

Ago deserved a medal from the Count for wrestling this bike round there for 42 laps at the speeds he did, in pursuit of those so-stable Ducatis. I hope he got a cash bonus, at least.

The MV F750 engine stamped simply as ‘2’ never let you forget its road bike heritage by its sound, either. The full fairing magnified all the clashing and whirring and meshing of gears inside the motor, sounds that for me have always made the early MV Agusta street bikes seem so unsophisticated compared to an equivalent Japanese multi.

Heresy, I know, but contrast to today’s F4, classic era MVs always seemed to make a lot of fuss about going nowhere in particular, very noisily but not very fast. UK magazine Motor Cycle Weekly's test of an admittedly unfaired MV 750 back in 1973 summed it up, when they got a mean average top speed of just 112mph, with a best run of 121mph with a stiff following wind.

And though tubular steel chassis no 1402, one of two specially made for the F750 racer, with an extra mounting point to tie the heavy engine in better to the duplex frame, did at least carry acceptably responsive suspension front and rear, courtesy of Ceriani and Girling respectively. The Scarab disc brakes worked surprisingly well (surprising, that is, to someone like me who could never get his own period 750SS Ducati to stop properly till he threw away the Scarabs that came with it, and fitted a set of AP-Lockheed calipers), it had none of the pinpoint finesse that MV bred into their GP bikes.

At the end of the day it all probably comes down to the fact that this bike was built in haste, raced on just a solitary occasion, and was never properly developed either then or later.

Whether or not it ever could have been turned into a match for the dominant BSA/Triumph triples and Desmo Ducati V-twins of the era is another matter. And one that in any case became irrelevant when Yamaha's sharp practice in homologating the TZ700 as a street-derived F750 racer-with-lights that in fact was never sold as a street bike, killed off any chance that genuine production-based four-stroke machinery ever had of continuing to be competitive in Formula 750.

Too bad that chance never came, but maybe 2012 will see MV Agusta finally triumphant in world-class Superbike racing?