Guzzi Loses A Great
GUZZI LOSES A GREAT
UMBERTO TODERO, for many years the engineering
encyclopedia and senior designer at Moto Guzzi, has died aged 82 after a career spanning 66 years. American Dr. John Wittner, who worked under Todero at the Guzzi factory, used the same words to describe Todero as Todero had of his mentor Giulio Carcano, Guzzi’s great engineer and architect of the Moto Guzzi 500cc V-Eight Grand Prix bike: “He was my professor and my friend.” Made head of Guzzi’s racing unit in 1951, Todero served through the exciting and creative postwar period when in quick succession the alongthe-ffame 500cc four-cylinder, Carcano’s ever-evolving 350cc horizontal-Single (winner of five world titles) and the legendary liquid-cooled VEight took their places on GP starting grids.
When company founder Carlo Guzzi had said, “Let’s do it” in response to the VEight proposal, Carcano and Todero were gambling that they could make the leap of technology from the 6000-8000-rpm Singles of the previous era to the 12,000-rpm-plus multis of the coming era. The high-revving V-Eight was their logical answer to Gilera’s across-theframe inline-Four.
Following the compression of design construction, dyno testing and first track appearance into less than six months, formidable crankshaft, ignition and fueling problems presented themselves. The team countered with vigorous development. Todero designed an interim crankshaft for the V-Eight whose assembly required timed threads; they reached the required tightness just as the flywheels swung into alignment!
Asked how this was done, he replied, “We had very good machinists.”
Because the bike never reached its potential, “The V-Eight was his greatest disappointment,” says Wittner. Carcano and Todero hoped to solve the remaining problems, but by 1957 motorcycles were losing business to the automobile, so just as the V-Eight seemed ready to win races, the money faded. Guzzi withdrew from GP racing at the end of the season. Nonetheless, the V-Eight-filled with countless details of prescient innovation-remains an inspiration to all those who want design to fly forward, not walk, and Todero was a huge
Wittner says of Todero’s modem presence at Guzzi, “He was so very energetic, tenacious and fearless.”
Todero continued creative design work to the end of his life, assisting most recently in the beautiful MGS01. Such men are never finished, for their thinking is a structure founded in the past, extending into an unknown future.
Kevin Cameron
