Mike Hailwood's Ducati 900F1 racer
Riding history on wheels
September/October 2009
By Alan Cathcart
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Kyoichi Nakamura
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June 3, 1978: Mike Hailwood returns to the TT after 11 years and wins. A week later, he takes the checkered flag at Mallory Park. “Mike the Bike” was back, and this is the bike he rode.
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“Mike the Bike’s” fairy tale Isle of Man comeback, in which he rode to decisive victory at record speed over the factory Honda team in the Formula One TT aboard his Sports Motor Cycles Ducati 900 V-twin, 11 years after he last raced on the Island and seven since he’d ridden a bike of any kind in international competition, is rightly considered one of the most remarkable feats in the history of motorcycle racing.
If on that day you’d told me, as I hung over the fence on the outside of the course in the Manx sunshine and watched my greatest hero winning his comeback race on my favorite bike, that someday I’d be thrashing round Mallory Park on that very same motorcycle, I’d have reckoned that a potent combination of the unlikely warmth and the Manx ale had got to you. Yet thanks to the generosity of the present day owners of Hailwood’s TT-winning Ducati, brothers Larry and Mark Auriana, and the man who made Hailwood’s feat possible by providing him with the bike in the first place, Steve Wynne, that’s exactly what happened.
The Sports Motor Cycles 900TT1
Perhaps because of the supportive presence at the 1978 TT of factory mechanics Franco Farne and Giuliano Pedretti, many feel Steve Wynne received less than due credit for not only preparing but also developing Hailwood’s Ducati into a Honda-beater. Following Hailwood’s epic win, the Ducati factory jumped on the promotional bandwagon with the best-selling Mike Hailwood Replica street clone later that same year, giving the impression Hailwood won the race — and Ducati’s first-ever World Championship — on a tricolor-painted full-works machine.
But this is far from being the case. Not only did Wynne have to agree to buy the two 900TT1 bikes for Hailwood and his teammate on the Sports Motor Cycles team, Roger Nicholls, to ride, but it was Wynne who painted them in red and green colors in recognition of Hailwood’s main sponsor, Castrol! What’s more, by the time they reached the Island, the Sports Ducatis incorporated a host of Wynne-developed improvements to their original semi-works specification, which Mike’s bike today — exactly as raced by Hailwood to his follow-up victory in the Post-TT race at Mallory Park a week after his TT win — still incorporates.
Ducati didn’t actually have a race department back then, so both machines were constructed in the Scuderia NCR race shop, a long stone’s throw outside the Bologna factory front gate, as modified versions of the NCR900 Endurance racers, complete with special sandcast, old-style round-case crankcases, one of 20 such pairs made with internal stiffening webs, as then permitted under F1 rules. These were also modified to accept a Pantah-style spin-on oil filter, and fitted with a close-ratio gearbox and all-metal dry clutch with magnesium outer cover.
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