TONTI LEGACY
In last month’s CB we looked at the life of Italian designer Lino Tonti. This month we focus on his involvement with Paton, including the evolution of the firm’s first bike in Verde Primavera – its famous green
This month Alan Cathcart explains how the Italian engineer helped launch race bike maker, Paton
Lino Tonti was an up-and-coming designer when he joined up with Grand Prix race mechanic Giuseppe Pattoni to develop the first Paton racing motorcycle in 1958. The machine was a spin-off from the demise of the Mondial GP team; Tonti had joined Mondial as chief engineer Alfonso Drusiani’s assistant in 1956. There he was responsible for developing the potent double-overheadcam singles which won those two world championships in 1957, in the hands of Tarquinio Provini (125cc) and Cecil Sandford (250cc).
The Italian marque owned by the aristocratic Boselli family then joined its
Gilera and Moto Guzzi fellow world champions in pulling out of road racing, when Count Boselli made the Mondial race team redundant. While Gilera and Moto Guzzi were large concerns which had decided to eschew racing to concentrate on propping up their road bike sales (under threat from a combination of the Fiat 500 and the increased consumer affluence of post-war Italy), Mondial was a very different company – run very much as an outlet for the family’s enthusiasm for racing, and bikes in general.
“Winning two world titles was the fulfilment of all my dreams,” recalled Count Boselli 25 years later. “It seemed the perfect moment that I knew could never be repeated. Having achieved such success, we could only lose it if we continued racing. So I decided to stop.” However, the classy Count not only paid the members of his title-winning team a handsome bonus, he also allowed Tonti, in conjunction with Sandford’s race mechanic Pattoni, to have access to the Mondial racing department to continue racing under the Paton (Pattoni/tonti) name.
The first Paton debuted at the Cattolica street race on the Adriatic coast in April 1958, ridden by Silvano Rinaldi. It was essentially a 175cc single-cam Mondial production racer; the engine had dimensions of 62 x 57.6mm and was topped off by a Tonti-designed twin-cam cylinder head with gear-driven cam drive up the right side of the engine. It produced 22bhp at 11,000rpm.
Several of these were raced successfully, with Jacky Onda winning the French national title on a 175 Paton twice in 1959-60, and future Aermacchi GP star Gilberto Milani taking victory in the prestigious San Remo post-season international in 1961. A twin-cam 125GP version was also made, with its 53 x 56.4mm engine delivering 18bhp at 11,500rpm. A dozen or so were built, including two supplied to British millionaire Stan Hailwood for his 18-year-old son Mike to ride in his inaugural TT in 1958, where he finished seventh despite being at least six inches too tall for the tiny bike! These first Paton singles established the marque as a contender in the smallest capacity classes, but its attempt to move up the capacity scale with the debut Paton twin was less successful.
In 1955 Mondial’s Drusiani had produced a prototype dohc parallel-twin 250 with central-gear cam drive that was bulky and overweight, and was never raced. In 1957 Tonti was assigned the task of improving it via a comprehensive redesign, with a view to having it ready for the 1958 season as a replacement for the new-for-’57 250GP single (whose development he had fast-forwarded into contention for the world title). His success in providing Sandford with a championship-winning bike, and Count Boselli’s subsequent withdrawal from racing, meant
this 250 twin was stillborn a second time around, so Count Boselli gifted it to Tonti and Pattoni as the basis for the first 100% Paton motorcycle.
Tonti redesigned the cylinder head, which shed further weight, and created a curious-looking tubular steel frame – but the bike still weighed 128kg when raced in the 1959 Italian GP at Monza by Giampiero Zubani, who broke down. To put the weight issue into perspective, the fivetime world champion Moto Guzzi 350GP single weighed just 99kg with full dustbin streamlining!
This debut Paton was still very much a work in progress when Tonti left that same year, after being hired by Bianchi as chief engineer. Although he was designing military and street bikes, he would also produce a trio of 250, 350 and 500cc parallel-twin GP racers that were uncannily similar in overall design to the Mondial-paton 250 twin!
“I was disappointed he left, but I quite understood why he had to do so,” Pattoni once said. “The motorcycle industry was on a downward spiral, and nobody could refuse an important job like that.”
On his own, Pattoni earned a living working for a Lancia car dealer in Milan, in charge of the service department. But fate was kind to him, for the firm was bought by Giorgio Pianta, a successful touring car driver and future team manager of Alfa Romeo’s factory race division.
As a racer himself, Pianta recognised Pattoni’s commitment to the competition cause, and allowed him to set up a Paton race workshop in the back of the dealership. There the man nicknamed ‘Peppino’ worked after hours on his Paton motorcycles, moonlighting his way to the Grand Prix grid with bikes created in his spare time.
In 1963 Pattoni produced a much lighter, physically smaller, dohc 250cc parallel-twin Paton, which retained the same 53 x 56.4mm engine dimensions as Tonti’s Mondialderived bike, but could be revved to 12,200rpm, where 32bhp was on tap. More to the point, the engine was much slimmer than Tonti’s 250, as well as lighter at 123kg (with oil, but no fuel).
This was the first Paton to wear what became the marque’s trademark green livery – Verde Primavera was the default colour for Italian delivery vans and trucks in the 1960s, so paint supplies were inexpensive and easily available!
After debuting in the springtime Temporada di Primavera seaside races that April, finishing sixth at Cesenatico, the new Paton 250 was ridden in 1964 GPS by Alberto Pagani,
‘THE DEBUT PATON WAS STILL VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS WHEN TONTI LEFT IN 1959, TO GO TO BIANCHI’
netting a remarkable third place in the Isle of Man TT by outlasting the works Hondas and Yamaha, Suzuki and MZ two-strokes – albeit 18 minutes behind winner Jim Redman’s Honda four.
This established the format for all future four-stroke Paton parallel twins, with a 180° crank, heavily-finned vertical cylinders with central gear drive between them to the twin overhead camshafts, a six-speed gearbox with gear primary drive and dry-sump lubrication provided in typical Italian fashion via a long, finned receptacle beneath the crankcase. Peppino’s bike even featured a side-loading gear cluster – a remarkable feature for the time, which enabled internal ratios to be quickly changed, just as on all GP bikes today.
In turn, the 250 Paton spawned a 350cc version, which debuted at Vallelunga in 1965 in the hands of Gilberto Parlotti, then found its way to Britain where it was briefly owned by Mike (now Michelle) Duff, before being bought by Liverpool car dealer Bill Hannah for his sponsored rider Fred Stevens to race.
This was the start of Pattoni’s most fruitful period, for Hannah was so impressed by the performance of the 350 twin that he encouraged Peppino to build a 500cc. This duly appeared in the spring of 1966 in Stevens’ hands, leading to a glorious day in Ulster in 1967, when Fred won both 350 and 500cc races at the North West 200 on the Hannah-patons. He finished sixth in the 500cc World Championship that year.
Both bikes had a very compact build, including a mere 1280mm wheelbase, which made the handling very lively over bumpy surfaces, but also delivered improbably fast handling for a 350/500 twin. When Stevens retired from racing to become a Jehovah’s Witness missionary, his replacement, Billie Nelson, was invariably a contender with the British singles for the honour of first privateer home in late-’60s Grands Prix.
The Paton should have become the best bet for privateers in the Continental Circus, but Pattoni was never the most commercial of men, and although he built and sold a total of ten four-stroke twins over a six-year period, he never did so with much of a business head. Indeed, it was after being badly stung financially by shipping two bikes to Algeria against payment by what turned out to be a forged bank draft, that he was forced to slim down his GP racing operation. He concentrated instead on preparing CB500 Honda fours for 1970s Italian production-based events. Still, he continued developing the Paton 500GP twin, and in 1971 produced an eight-valve version which riders Roberto Gallina and Virginio Ferrari took to leaderboard finishes against the oncoming two-stroke tide.
But, unlike many of his four-stroke contemporaries, Pattoni was able to move with that tide, and in 1980 produced a new and innovative two-stroke Paton 500 – a singlecrank V4 design with the outer cylinders angled at 90° to the inner pair. Four years later, Honda paid him the compliment of copying this unusual format when producing their first four-cylinder two-stroke, the NSR500. Imitation is always the sincerest form of flattery!
In the hard-headed world of modern Grand Prix racing, Pattoni was destined to become a much-loved reminder of all our yesterdays – a humble man working out of a backstreet garage, racing against the rich and powerful MV team of Count Agusta. In true fairytale fashion, he even beat them occasionally, as when Angelo Bergamonti won the 1967 Italian 500cc Championship on his Paton twin.
Peppino was someone who literally devoted his whole life to what amounted to his hobby. He was armed with an enthusiasm and dedication so contagious that his son Roberto joined with him to compete against Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha with a Bimota-framed 500cc V4 two
‘PATTONI WAS A HUMBLE MAN WORKING OUT OF A BACKSTREET GARAGE, RACING AGAINST RICH AND POWERFUL MV’
stroke contender they’d created themselves, in their dimlylit garage backing on to a railway line in a decidedly insalubrious suburb of Milan.
Vittorio Scatola brought tears to Peppino’s eyes at Misano in May 1988, by winning the Italian round of the 500cc European Championship on the Paton against a full grid of privateer Suzukis, Yamahas and Hondas – the last-ever race victory in a 500cc race for a Paton, albeit ironically painted for the first time ever in uncharacteristic red and white colours, thanks to one-off Avia petroleum sponsorship.
This victory underlined the Paton’s worthy challenge to the products of far larger teams and established manufacturers – a fact recognised by the many people in the Grand Prix paddock, like Yamaha GP engineering guru Kel Carruthers and HRC boss Youichi Oguma, for whom Peppino and Roberto and their achievements were the object of deep admiration. This explains the set of exotic, tricked-out Keihin carburettors, specially developed for the Honda NSR500, which happened to appear on the similar-format 500 Paton around that time...
Inevitably, the Paton 500GP race effort eventually petered out – and it was only after his death, at the age of 72, in 1999 that Pattoni’s dream of seeing his bikes become serial race winners actually came true. This happened after his son Roberto, himself aged 57, dusted off the designs for the eight-valve version of the 500 Bicilindrica that Peppino had penned in 1968, in order to resume manufacture of further examples of it for use in classic racing, which had by then expanded globally.
The first of the 34 examples that have been constructed to date of these continuazione recreations – not replicas, since these are simply a continuation of manufacture of the old Paton 500cc race bikes – was built in 2004. Since then, the green Italian twin (costing upwards of 90,000 euros depending on specification) has replaced the ultrashort-stroke modern-day Manx Norton and Matchless G50 ‘supermonos’ as the weapon of choice at the highest level of classic racing worldwide. In fact, it has been repeatedly victorious at the Isle of Man Classic TT in five out of the past six years from 2013 onwards, most recently with TT legend John Mcguinness aboard.