Resurrecting the Fire Engines

RESURRECTING THE FIRE ENGINES

RACE WATCH

MV Agusta’s historic racebikes change status: from passively retired to actively Obsolete

RON LAWSON

PAUL DEAN

WHEN YOU HEAR TALES OF international espionage, the-sky's-the-limit bidding and high-level politicking, you don’t expect them to be about anything so mundane as vintage motorcycles. But those sorts of machinations are exactly what transpired during Gruppo Agusta’s recent sale of its historic MV racebike collection. Gruppo Agusta, for those who don’t already know, is the Italian state-owned helicopter manufacturer that once was the most powerful force the sport of roadracing had ever known.

Before this international affair was

all over, it read more like a plot for a James Bond movie. And when the smoke finally cleared, Team Obsolete, the vintage-racing organization run by New Yorkers Robert Iannucci and Jeff Elghanayan, came away

owning Agusta’s entire collection of MV factory racebikes—those famous red-and-silver “fire engines’’ that won a total of 38 world championships and 270 GPs from 1952 until the company’s withdrawal from racing in 1976.

In all, Team Obsolete took possession of more than a dozen machines, most in running condition, plus a large assortment of spares. Among the runners is the last MV ever to win a GP—the 500cc Four that Giacomo Agostini rode to victory in the Nurburgring round of the 1976 world championship series. The collection also includes a 125 and a 250 Single, both of which won world titles in the late Fifties; some of the bulkier, early-style 500 Fours that the team raced throughout the Fifties and into the mid-Sixties; several of the 350 and 500cc Triples that replaced the

early Fours up until the early Seventies; and some late-design 350 and 500cc Fours that MV raced from around 1972 until it bowed out of racing in 1976.

Actually, Team Obsolete did not

purchase every racebike in the MV collection. With the approval of Iannucci and Elghanayan, Agusta sold one to John Surtees, who won all seven of his world-championship titles on MVs. This particular 500cc Four—or most of it, at least—is one that Surtees rode in the mid-Fifties. He apparently holds that motorcycle in great esteem, for he allegedly paid $150,000 for the right to call it his own. Some people have speculated that Surtees intends to ride the bike in the historic races to be held in conjunction with numerous GP events this year, but Iannucci believes that the former MV ace will simply parade it on appropriate occasions.

Team Obsolete, on the other hand, fully intends to race its newly acquired stable of MVs in European and American vintage-bike events. The bikes will be kept in Italy, however, where they’ll be race-prepped and maintained at the facilities of Roberto Gallina, who for the past decade has run the Italian-based Suzuki GP team. •

In the end, the decision by Iannucci and Elghanayan to keep these legendary machines in Italy was one of several key factors that led to their successful acquisition of the bikes. Numerous other parties around the world were intent on buying the MVs, the most determined being the Fuji Motor Museum in Japan. Representatives from Fuji made repeated bids on the MVs, each higher than the one before it, and all substantially higher than Team Obsolete’s offer. But Agusta officials were concerned that these irreplaceable bits of Italian heritage would either be carted off to Japan if sold to Fuji, or scattered all around the world after being bought by some consortium interested in the bikes only for their resale value. So when Team Obsolete proposed to actually race the machines in European and American events; to base their MV team in Italy; to display the Gruppo Agusta name on the bikes; and to hire the former chief of engine develop-

ment at MV, Ruggiero Mazza, to oversee their preparation, Agusta ended the months of negotiations and awarded the sale to the Americans. That Iannucci is a first-generation Italian-American didn't hurt Team Obsolete’s effort one bit, either, for his Neapolitan family background carried considerable weight with the highly patriotic Agusta officials in charge of the sale.

Still, the purchase was quite a stretch for Team Obsolete’s captains, both of whom had to mortgage practically everything they own to swing the deal. They won't divulge the final sale price, which the Italian press claims was in excess of $ 1 million—a figure Iannucci adamantly calls “a gross exaggeration.” He does say, however, that he worked a substantial sponsorship deal with Agusta, which is where much of the money to run the team will come from. He's currently looking for additional sponsors to further subsidize what promises to be a major-league effort.

To most Americans, all of this may seem like much adieu about zilch;

just a couple of old-bike freaks buying a bunch of outdated Italian roadracers. But in Europe, and especially in Italy, the sale of the MVs was real news. Count Domenico Agusta, the founder of the company and the patriarch of the MV race team who died in 1974, is somewhat of a legend in Italy, and his famous racebikes are regarded as national treasures, even by many Italians who have never even sat on a motorcycle. Thus, the sale of the MVs got regular coverage in major newspapers all around the country, and even was the subject of a half-hour documentary on Italian television.

So while Team Obsolete’s purchase will take the MVs out of the hands of their creators, it will give enthusiasts in many parts of the world a chance to see these legendary machines in action for the very first time. It will also give many thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts their first chance to see an MV factory racebike someplace other than in pictures— and to hear the fierce wail of an exhaust note that for decades was the enthusiast’s definition of “exotic.”

Very few of these works machines ever got into the hands of private teams, for the Count was truly obsessed with keeping his beloved bikes—and the unpatented design secrets they held—in “the family.” When the time would come to dispose of any important MV racing hardware, the Count would find some bizarre way to insure that it would never fall into the wrong hands. Usually, he would have any obsolete MVs disassembled bit-bybit, and save the pieces until some fresh concrete was being poured at nearby Malpensa airport (which was under constant expansion during that era, and which was built on ground owned by the Agusta family) just outside of Milan. The Count would then have the pieces dumped into the excavated area, and the concrete poured over the top of them.

Iannucci and Elghanayan can’t promise that their involvement with the MVs will be quite that fanatical. They do, however, intend to conduct a full-scale, professional-quality race

program with the bikes. At the same time, they understand that these MVs undoubtedly could dominate historic-bike racing today much the same as they dominated GP racing two or three decades ago. Neither of them wishes that to come about, since it would be a serious detriment to a sport they’ve worked for years to promote. “We don’t want to overwhelm the competition,” says Elghanayan (who also rides for the team under the name Marco Polo), “so we will not always race the very fastest of the MVs. And we will not race them at all any time the competition clearly wouldn’t have a chance. We’d like the presence of these motorcycles to help historic-bike racing, not hurt it. We want to be sportsmanlike about it all and have a good chance of winning, but without totally dominating the racing.”

Team Obsolete already has made arrangements with several riders to race the bikes during the '87 season. Naturally, Dave Roper,—the perennial Team Obsolete rider who scored America’s first-ever victory at the Isle

of Man in 1984,—will be among the Agusta riders, as will Elghanayan — er, Marco Polo —himself. And Iannucci says there is a good possibility that two living legends of motorcycle racing, Giacomo Agostini (15time world champion, 1 3 of them on an MV) and Phil Read (7-time world champion, twice on an MV), will race Team Obsolete MVs in select historic-bike meetings.

Unfortunately, the list of races that the MVs will contest in 1987 does not include the historic-bike event held at Daytona during the upcoming Speedweek. Team Obsolete will compete there, but with its usual collection of vintage racers rather than its new Italian toys. For one thing, the newly formed team doesn’t have much time to get a respectable effort together; and for another, Iannucci doesn’t feel that it’s worthwhile for the team to knock itself out for the Daytona vintage race—this country’s premier historic-bike competition—because that event is not taken seriously enough by the organizers. The race gets next to nothing in the way of promotion, and the press access to the track on the day of the event is, in Iannucci’s words, “lousy.” He says the event can’t even begin to compare with the one held, say, at the Paul Ricard circuit in France, where the vintage-bike riders are treated with practically the same regard and respect as the likes of Lawson and Mamola. Iannucci

thinks that the famous “fire engines” will make an appearance somewhere in the U.S. during 1987, but just doesn't know where at this time.

Besides, if Iannucci and Elghanayan don't yet seem to have their new effort shifted into high gear, it’s quite understandable. They probably could use a little R&R after months of take-no-prisoners negoti-

ating, politicking and financial scheming. As Iannucci summed it up, “Jeff and I got to feeling like we were running for public office in the Italian government.”

All things considered, it’s too bad they were not; after they announced their intentions with the MV racebikes, they would have won by a landslide.