Beschreibung:

Mike Hailwood's 1978 Isle of Man TT comeback ride is the stuff of legend. Out of top-flight bike racing for seven years and away from the Island for eleven, he took on and beat the might of the Honda works team to win the Formula 1 TT at record speed. Hailwood's machine was entered by Manchester-based Ducati dealership, Sports Motor Cycles Ltd, which had come tantalisingly close to victory in the previous year's inaugural Formula 1 race. Roger Nicholls (Mike's team-mate in '78) appeared to have got the better of Phil Read's works Honda in the wet conditions, only for the race to be cut short in controversial circumstances that gifted victory - and the first TT F1 World Championship - to Read and Honda. The Hailwood and Nicholls bikes were part of a small batch of around 25 such machines built by the legendary NCR race shop in Italy for TT Formula 1 and FIM Coupe d'Endurance racing. 'NCR' stood for the names of its founders, ex-factory race mechanics Giorgio Nepoti, Rino Caracchi and Luigi Rizzi, although after Rizzi's early departure the 'R' stood for Racing. NCR was founded in 1967 in the small town of Borgo Panigale on the outskirts of Ducati's hometown of Bologna. Situated a stone's throw from the Ducati factory, NCR functioned as the semi-official race team from the early 1970s, there being no direct works involvement at that time, although factory engineers and mechanics routinely assisted favoured privateers. The Nepoti/Caracchi philosophy was that everything could be improved, lightened or made more powerful, and like all truly great tuners they paid attention to the smallest detail in the knowledge that racing would inevitably expose any weaknesses. Their emblem, a speeding cartoon dog wearing a helmet, is known the world over. Nicholls' 1977 TT F1 Ducati - '014', the machine offered here - was collected from the Ducati factory in the spring of that year by Sports Motor Cycles' Pat Slinn, who at that time was working from the UK importer, Coburn & Hughes. It was originally built as an endurance racer and has a special frame incorporating eccentric chain adjusters at the swinging arm ends and similar mounts for the footrests. These arrangements are quite unlike those of the production frame and were intended to speed up pit-stops, the adjustable footrests making it easier to accommodate riders of different heights. In 1973 Benjamin Grau and Salvador Canellas had scored an emphatic victory at the Barcelona 24 Hours race riding a works bike entered by Ducati's Spanish offshoot, Mototrans, contemporary photographs of which show a frame identical to this one. Pat Slinn, a frequent visitor to both the Ducati factory and NCR, tells us that he never saw another one like it. Sadly, the Ducati factory no longer retains any records relating to the 1970s endurance-racing programme. Before the Ducati was loaded into the van to bring it back to the UK, factory tester/engineer Franco Farné fired it up and rode up and down outside the race shop to show that it worked! The machine had not been touched since its last endurance race and the Sports Motor Cycles team had plenty of work to do to prepare it for the TT. As collected in 1977, the ex-endurance racer was fitted with Scarab calipers (soon replaced by Brembo) Campagnolo alloy wheels, contact-points ignition, a high-level exhaust system, separate seat and tank, and a Ducati fairing complete with quick filler. The fairing and seat/tank unit currently fitted are Sports Motor Cycles' copies of the works items fitted to Hailwood's 1978 TT-winning bike, and were on this machine when the current vendor purchased it from Sports Motor Cycles' proprietor, Steve Wynne, in 1982. The accompanying bill of sale, dated 20th October 1982, lists Mike Hailwood, Phil Read, Tom Heron Alex George, Tony Rutter, Roger Marshall, Steve Tonkin, Steve Manship and Eddie Roberts as having ridden the ex-Nicholls Ducati, though by no means all of them raced it. As received, the Ducati came with Brembo Goldline