Ducati175SS
Ducati has long since sold its customers what the factory raced, with this rare model the one which set the precedent.
For the past 67 years Ducati’s USP (unique selling proposition) has been the closeness of its customer products to the bikes its factory riders successfully race with at the highest level. Even if today it bravely seeks to compete with three of the four Japanese manufacturers in MotoGP racing, like the fourth, Kawasaki, Ducati’s natural sporting home is Superbike racing, with its riders aboard evolved versions of bikes its customers can buy in their friendly local Ducati dealer.
It’s been that way ever since May 1954, when progettista Fabio Taglioni began work at the state-owned Ducati factory in Bologna, then considered to be at the lower end of the plethora of Italian manufacturers competing to meet the need for personal transportation in postwar Italy, with Ducati’s prosaic range comprising the Cucciolo clip-on moped engine, Cruiser scooter and various 100cc pushrod-engined models.
But Ducati’s president/CEO since 1952, Dr Giuseppe Montano, was a convivial and dynamic leader, whose far-sightedness was largely responsible for the success it enjoyed in future years. Under Montano, the reconstruction was completed of Ducati’s Borgo Panigale factory, which had been bombed by USAF aircraft a decade earlier while under German occupation, and equipped with the latest in precision machinery – all ironically largely funded by American Marshall Plan money. While a Government appointee, Montano was also a keen motorcyclist, who recognised that the sport-mad Italian public bought in the shops what won on the racetrack – call it the Monday morning syndrome.
Before hiring Taglioni, he’d publicly stated Ducati had to go racing successfully to acquire the sporting prestige that other older companies like Guzzi and Gilera, let alone more recent marques like MV and Mondial, already possessed through winning races and titles. But, unlike them, Montano insisted that Ducati’s competition bikes should ultimately be based on its street range, instead of comprising exotic racers quite unlike what it sold to the public. For Taglioni, by now equally passionate for racing, working under such a man was hugely inspiring, and rewarding. Thanks to Montano’s imaginative approach, and Taglioni’s creative talent, Ducati became famous for creating sports-orientated production models with the same specification as those its factory riders raced with. Nothing’s changed!
Gran Sport
Hence Taglioni’s first task at Ducati was to establish the seed corn of a range of sporting singles, and in November 1954 the 100 Gran Sport appeared, universally nicknamed the ‘Marianna’ in Italy because this was a year designated by the Pope as dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Its 98cc engine with bevel-drive SOHC established the high-tech format for successive Ducati models up to 436cc appearing over the next two decades, and at a time when all its 100cc class rivals, especially the Laverdas which dominated Italian long-distance events, were OHV pushrod designs, the Marianna stood out for its technical intricacy, made possible by Ducati’s new high-precision machine tools.
Indeed, Taglioni proclaimed that the bike which had inspired its design was the Manx Norton with similar vertical shaft and bevel-gear camdrive, which just three years earlier had been 500cc world champion. The comparison didn’t hurt sales, with a two-month waiting list for the Marianna, even with Ducati’s overall production lifted to 130 bikes a day.
That demand arose because Ducati blitzed the crucial long-distance Italian events in 1955, the Marianna dominating its class in both the 3438km Motogiro, with a Ducati rider winning each of the nine stages, and the 1283km single-stage Milano-Taranto, filling the first four places in the 100cc category. By then Taglioni had begun moving up the capacity scale with a 125cc version, which duly won its class on debuting in the 1955 Milano-Taranto ridden by Giuliano Maoggi, who then won the Motogiro outright on it in 1956, defeating all its larger 175cc rivals. Still using the same vertically-split crankcases, which he’d foreseen should have space for a five- or even sixspeed gearbox compared to the SOHC (monoalbero) 98cc Marianna’s four-speeder, Taglioni then produced Ducati’s first 125cc Grand Prix DOHC (bialbero) fivespeed customer racer, which appeared in 1956, with comparable success.
But at the December 1956 Milan Show, a new Ducati road model was launched which was to prove the precursor of the entire range of Taglioni-designed SOHC singles, both valve-spring and desmo, over the next 20 years: the 175 Sport. Accompanied by large banners announcing the recent capture of 44 world records by Carini and Ciceri on the 100cc Marianna streamliner, including 11 in the 175cc class, the launch of the largestcapacity Ducati road bike yet produced made waves in Italy. For the new model brought a distinctly sporting flair to the till-now rather lacklustre range of Borgo Panigale products, in which the limited-availability 100/125 Gran Sport machines were the only bright spots.
For with the newly launched Fiat 500 minicar set to eat into ride-to-work bike sales, and hefty marketing by Vespa and Lambretta to entice people onto scooters, motorcycle manufacturers like Ducati urgently needed to broaden their range to appeal to the committed motorcyclist looking for a spicy model specification, and a successful involvement in racing on the part of the factory to give him something to boast about to his mates in his local bar. Ducati had already taken care of the latter, and during 1956 Taglioni worked hard on the design of a new generation of road bikes to add the former.
175 Sport
Because it was the next capacity class up not already covered by the factory’s range, the 175 Sport was the first of the new line to be announced. In creating it, Taglioni maintained his policy of scaling up rather than down, once again using the identical engine bottom half as on the Marianna launched two years earlier. But befitting the fact these were volume production models, the aluminium engine castings were diecast rather than sandcast as on the Marianna, and although the outline specification resembled the 100 Gran Sport’s, there were several detail differences, particularly in the head design. The 175 Sport’s SOHC two-valve head had its valve gear operated by vertical shaft and bevels as on the GS, but the coil springs now fitted were also fully enclosed, with access to the tappets available via the finned rocker covers which would become so familiar in later years to generations of Ducati owners.
The Marianna had carried exposed hairpin springs to permit easy replacement of a broken spring in the longdistance races the bike was aimed at – and indeed one reason Taglioni shortly developed a desmo cylinder head for Ducati’s factory 125GP racer was because of the poor quality of the wire then used for making valve springs leading to constant breakages at high rpm.
Otherwise the 175 Sport’s wet-sump engine looked externally identical to Ducati’s 250/350/450cc singles of the early 1970s, complete with standard 10º forward inclination of the cylinder housing a cast iron liner, vertical shaft and bevel drive up the right side of the engine to the single overhead camshaft, a unit construction four-speed gearbox with helical gear-driven primary replacing the Marianna’s straight-cut gears to cut down on noise (same as the bevel gears, despite the loss in power this entailed), two litres of oil carried in the sump to lubricate the engine, gearbox and multiplate clutch, and battery and coil ignition with the points located behind a cover on the right front side of the engine, and driven by a spur gear off the bottom camdrive bevel. It was the debut of a classic design in motorcycle history, which was to remain in uninterrupted production for almost 20 years.
Measuring 62x57.8mm, the new 174.50cc Ducati motor departed from the period long stroke norm by being 7 oversquare, one of Taglioni’s future trademarks. Producing 14bhp at 7500rpm, its specific output of 80bhp/ litre was exceptional for a road bike of the period and, fitted into a cleaned-up version of the Gran Sport’s singleloop frame, the result weighed just 106kg with full road equipment and a pillion seat. Seventeen inch wheels were later dropped in favour of 18-inch rims. Though only a four-speed gearbox was fitted, performance was excellent compared to the opposition, with a top speed of 135km/h. A cheaper, less potent 11bhp Turismo version was also offered, which to begin with outsold the Sport, but after two years the positions were reversed. Both carried a small flywheel magneto on the drive side of the crank which supplied power for the battery, and enabled a full lighting set to be fitted.
In 1957 the horrendous death toll in the Mille Miglia car race resulted in the end of long-distance public roads racing in Italy, including the Motogiro and Milano-Taranto. The focus now shifted for 1958 to the new MSDS/Moto Sportive Derivate dalla Serie short circuit class for Modified Production bikes, soon to be rechristened Formula 3, and the leading vehicle for Italian manufacturers to demonstrate the worth of their products in the 125cc and 175cc F3 classes. With this in mind, at that December’s Milan Show Ducati announced an uprated model named the 175 Super Sport, with its
“Ducati urgently needed to broaden their range to appeal to the committed motorcyclist looking for a spicy model specification.”
gold frame and metallic scarlet anatomica fuel tank which was christened the ‘jelly mould’ fuel receptacle in the UK, once Mike Hailwood’s father’s Kings of Oxford chain started importing their bikes as a quid pro quo for Ducati furnishing him with factory desmo GP racers for his upand-coming son. In doing so, they renamed the 175 Sport the Ducati Silverstone, and the 175SS the Silverstone Super.
Stuff of dreams
The shapely 18-litre tank adorned with clip-on brackets for a tank pad featured recesses for arms as well as knees, and propelled the 175SS to become the stuff of dreams of every Italian boy racer – and not just a few in other countries besides, despite the fact that the Sport’s heavier, costlier, eye-candy Silentium double-stack silencer exhaust was replaced by a single long, tapering racing megaphone-type pipe on the SS.
Aimed fair and square at the nine other manufacturers competing in Formula 3, this little production racer had a lumpier cam and 9.5:1 compression ratio (vs.8:1 on the Sport), sufficient for a dramatic increase in speed to over 150kph, via an output of 19bhp at 9700 rpm. Yet despite the admission by Ducati’s sales boss Cosimo Calcagnile that the SOHC Ducati cost around 20 more to manufacture than its pushrod rivals, thanks to the greater productivity permitted by its latest-and-greatest machine tools, Ducati was able match its OHV opposition on price. The more technically refined 175 Sport cost 256,000 lire v 279,000 for the Morini Tresette Sprint, or 256,000 for the Motobi Catria Sport. No contest.
From the very first races in the F3 category midway through 1958 the 125/175 Ducatis proved to be the class of the field, with one of the first bikes built ending up in Argentina, where Roberto Galluzzi – uncle of progettista Miguel Angel Galluzzi, inventor of the Ducati Monster – scored the model’s first three race wins in successive months from June 1958 onwards. Ducati 175SS riders won over 100 races, several via Ducati technician Francesco Villa – later founder of the Moto Villa marque in 1968, and brother of future world champion Walter – at the helm. This included the most prestigious one of all, when he won the 175cc Formula 3 support race to the 1958 Italian GP at Monza, averaging 142kph/88mph.
After dominating this, the nicely tuned-up Villa then finished third in a Ducati sweep of the first five places in the 125cc Grand Prix, riding Taglioni’s new trialbero desmo twin! He made it a hat-trick of Monza F3 victories in 1959-60, and also teamed with Alfredo Balboni to win the 1960 Barcelona 24 Horas marathon on a 175 SS F3, defeating the several larger-capacity British and German twins and singles, as well as the legions of Spanish twostrokes.
Indeed, Ducati’s dominance with the 175SS F3 spread far and wide, with championships won by its riders in Canada, Argentina and Morocco, as well as in the showroom stakes back home in Italy, where the 175 Sport gained more than a 25 slice of its important capacity market. This came partly at least thanks to the 1957-58 achievement of ex-Ducati factory racer and future owner of Italjet Leopoldo Tartarini and his partner Giorgio Monetti in completing a year-long 60,000km round the world trip on a pair of the then-new 175 Sports, travelling through 42 countries in five continents to demonstrate the durability of this all-new design.
But even more significantly, this model was the basis of
Ducati’s entrée into the vital US market through its newly appointed distributors, the Berliner brothers Joe and Mike, who used the 175 Sport as the promotional tool to introduce Ducati’s sporting credentials to US customers, to such good effect that by the early 1960s as much as 80 of Ducati’s annual production was being sold by the Berliner Motor Corporation.
After Galluzzi’s and Villa’s 1958 victories, the Berliners sponsored another Ducati technician Franco Farnè to spend six months in the USA early in 1959, racing a factory development 175 Sport on which he defeated all the larger capacity bikes to win the 250cc support race to the Daytona 200 in March that year, following up with seven further race wins in the USA and Canada before returning to Italy in July to a hero’s welcome.
American owner
This promoted the sale of several 175SS racers-with-lights to customers all over America, and one of them has been discovered and restored by my American mate Jeff Craig – a dedicated Anglophile motorcyclist with whom I shared a flat when he moved to London in the 1970s. A former dirt oval flat-tracker back in the US, Jeff and I also road raced together in the UK on a succession of Ducati and Aermacchi singles, in between his buying an unrestored Brough Superior SS100, on which he later covered several thousand miles, both in the UK and after he shipped it back home to Pennsylvania. So how did such an avid enthusiast of British bikes, and Velocettes in particular, ever end up owning a Ducati single?
“I was heavily exposed to Ducatis in Britain in the 1970s, but never actually owned one,” says Jeff. “So in 2006 I started thinking – what Ducati would I like if I could have one? Well, it should be Motogiro eligible, so that makes it 1958/59, and I always liked the jelly-mould tanks, so that meant it had to be a 175SS, which my friend Douglas Fowler who has a lovely Ducati Mach 1 Special he built himself, told me was completely unavailable, I’d never find one. Still, I decided that’s what I wanted, and two days later I’m reading an article about them when my friend Karl calls up, saying howsit, what’s up – so I said I was thinking about getting a 175 Ducati with a jelly-mould tank. He said ‘Oh, I know where there’s one – it belongs to a guy named Frenchie who’s in a pretty rough part of Philadelphia, here’s his number!’
“So I call Frenchie up, ‘yeah I wanna sell it but it’s apart,’ so this was on a Sunday morning, and Monday night after work it’s pouring with rain, I get in the minivan with 4000 bucks in my pocket, which is what Douglas told me I should expect to pay for a 175SS in bits, and I drive to absolutely the roughest place in Philadelphia called Shotgun House, with a barbed wire fence, chains, everything is rusted, it was just like a Goth horror movie.
“So I go up, knock at the door, your standard big mutt comes snarling at me, I go in and there’s a hotrod car right in the middle of the house, and all down either side are motorcycles and motorcycle books, guns, Nazi flag – you know, a typical Philadelphia divorced guy house! Frenchie is about as tall as Michael J. Fox and skinny as a rail, probably 71/72 years old, club racer all his life, used to race small Hondas up until a few years ago.
“The Ducati is out back, so we go across his yard to this big cinder block garage with all chains and locks, door comes up, and there it is – no tank, just grotty, engine covered with oil, no exhaust, wheels are in so it’s a rolling chassis. He had the tank inside as a display item, so we started at $3000 and I got it for $2500, knowing the engine would surely need work. So I give him the cash, wheel
“Ducati’s dominance with the 175SS F3 spread far and wide, with championships won in Canada, Argentina and Morocco.”
it out, stick it in the minivan on its side, throw all the parts in and drive on home. Next morning I dragged it out into my workshop and of course everybody’s like, oh Jeff Craig, Mr British Motorcycle, bought an Italian racer, must be going senile! But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got about it. Still, I let it stew for a year-and-a-half, till I figured where I was going to go with it.”
Engine rebuild
In the meantime Jeff ’s good friend and avid 250GP twostroke tuner/racer Bill Himmelsbach offered to rebuild the engine, drawing on his experience years back as service manager in a Triumph dealership when a couple of Ducatis had needed attention. “It was in pretty good condition,” says Bill. “It had been modified to race, but didn’t have much time on it.” Still, he totally disassembled the motor, pulled the crank apart, put all new bearings and seals in it; did a valve job and replaced the piston rings, which were pretty well worn. Turns out the engine had been bored out to 64x57.8 mm to make 186cc, presumably in order to make it legal for 250cc AMA racing, where after Farnè’s achievement of rounding up all the proper 250s with his 175 Sport, a rule change had been enacted that no undersize bikes could compete in the next class up!
To do this, the unknown American tuner had used a Robbins M1625 forged slipper-type piston with a short skirt made in California, which not only had a domed crown which raised compression considerably to 11:1 compared to the flatter-top 9:1 Ducati piston, but also had only three rings instead of the stock 175 Sport’s four – it had twin oil rings. The Robbins oil ring was broken, and with Charlie Robbins long gone to the drag strip in the sky, Bill Himmelsbach took a while to find someone to make a new one, but Las Vegas-based Deves Piston Rings www.deves.com did the job. ”It’s a special oil control ring with four parts to it,” says Bill. “I thought it was wrong the first time I put it together because it turned over so hard, and what has to happen is that as it heats up, the metal changes to give the correct tension.” To denote its tunedup status the 186cc Ducati still uses F3 cams, but with a bigger 25mm Dell’Orto carb against the stock 175SS’s 22.5mm one.
Meantime, the cycle parts had been impeccably restored by Jeff and his mate Douglas Fowler, who also manufactured an F3 exhaust pipe with a gently tapering megaphone. Only trouble was, just as the parts started piling up at home, Jeff ’s work in the oil industry intensified. “I started going frequently to Alaska and Canada,” he says, “so I was never home, and I thought this project was going to languish. But Bill Himmelsbach said, ‘why don’t you bring it here and when you have time, we’ll put it together, together.’ So I took it to him – and next thing you know he’s put it together, and it’s a complete motorcycle. I can’t thank him and Douglas enough, as well as my Manx Norton-owning friend Paul Adams, who laced up the wheels for me. It was a proper cooperative venture!” One that bears green race plates to denote its life as a 250cc class contestant, with the headlamp peeking out from behind the front one, Motogiro-style.
I got the chance to take the just-finished Ducati for an enjoyable spin around the quiet lanes of Pennsylvania’s Nockamixon State Park on a warm summer day, followed by a faster fling along the state highway outside. Despite the high compression the little engine starts easily when warm, but won’t idle since you have to blip the throttle to keep it running above 3000rpm to ensure you’re pumping enough oil to lubricate the roller big end and top end of the motor – you must never lug the engine, so it’s never low on oil.
Having begun my racing carer back in the mists of time on a valve-spring Ducati 250 Mach 1S which Jeff also raced, sliding aboard the Craig 175 Sport was a real trip down
memory lane. Except this lean, low bike with its singleloop frame felt much more diminutive than the more substantial-seeming duplex cradle framed Mach 1S which was the ultimate extension of that Taglioni motor. Lift your right foot to select bottom gear and feed out the lightaction clutch – and almost at once it’s time to hit second gear, because first is so low it’s more or less useless except for getting off the mark. Wonder why? On a four-speed gearbox this is a real handicap I hadn’t been expecting – all the various Ducati other singles I’ve owned down the years had five-speed gearboxes, so it’s as if they had one set of ratios for all models with the four-speed transmission, and the racers had to put up with that. Strange.
Muted howl
But driving hard on in second the torquey little motor came into its own, accompanied by a glorious muted howl from the tapered exhaust, which sounds more like a 125 than a 250 – Douglas Fowler did a great job in confecting that, just as Bill Himmelsbach did in setting up the carburation, which is flawless – no hiccups or spitting back when you get hard on the throttle exiting a turn, as so often with bikes like this with a lumpy cam. Instead, there was a lovely, clean drive from 3000rpm upwards, to the 7500rpm mark I was using as a change point on this recently rebuilt motor. That was quite enough to keep it in the power band when I hit a higher gear, with 7000rpm in top gear equating to 80mph on the tiny speedo to the left of the white-faced Veglia tacho – what else? – in its neat little bolt-on housing.
Thanks to the lumpy cam, roll-on isn’t the greatest – you must use the gearbox to keep the engine revving. Even with my un-Latin weight aboard, performance was spirited, if not exceptional – but remember we’re talking 1958 valve-spring technology here. The 10 years younger ex-works 350 desmo Ducati SCD dry-clutch single I raced rather successfully – once I’d learnt how to bump-start it in races! – in the 1980s was a different generation in terms of engineering.
No getting away from it, with its 1320mm/52in wheelbase, this is a very small bike better suited to more diminutive people than my 5ft 10in stature, with its slim build exacerbated by the very high-set footrests – I’m not sure why they’re so high, since even the grippy race compound 80/90-18 Avon Roadrunners fitted at both ends don’t permit an extreme enough lean angle to make ground clearance an issue. Steering is fingertip-light, without quite being twitchy – but the compliance of the frankly pretty crude Marzocchi fork was way beyond what I expected.
Kudos to Bill Himmelsbach for his work in setting this up, because the bumpy but grippy tarmac of the State Park’s roads gave his settings a severe workout in terms of maintaining corner speed, which they passed with flying colours. Still, when you’ve brought your son Mike up to be Penske Shocks’ no.1 race technician, you must know what you’re doing! You can squeeze the 180mm SLS front brake hard enough to j-u-s-t stop on its own from reasonably high speed without locking up – but why would you? The Ducati stops well if you use both brakes, but either one on its own isn’t really sufficient.
Riding the Craig Ducati 175SS was a marvellous reminder of my early days in racing – but with the help of his friends he’s also recreated a marvellous period piece in motorcycle history. See you at Motogiro 2022, then, Jeff?