The 500cc V-8 racing engine by Moto Guzzi is one of the most exotic and beautiful Grand Prix powerplants ever made. Never mind that it never won a GP! Eight pipes, eight carburetors and spinning to 14,000 rpm, it revved DOUBLE the rpm of the famous Norton Manx 500cc single racing at the same time. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer talk about the Moto Guzzi V-8's origins, its development, and it untimely demise!
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00:00:00Welcome to the CycleWorld podcast. We're in with another episode. It's Kevin
00:00:05Cameron, our technical editor, and I'm Mark Hoyer, the editor-in-chief. The
00:00:10podcast is brought to you by Octane Lending. We've got to get the sponsor in
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00:00:38Thank you again, Octane. This week's topic is the Moto Guzzi 500cc V8 of the 1950s.
00:00:50I have not stood next to the real one. I stood next to a replica, a very
00:00:59thorough and complete replica, a beautiful bike. It had eight 20 millimeter
00:01:04Dilorto carburetors, tiny little Dilorto carburetors, on the original 500 V8.
00:01:09Double overhead cam, liquid-cooled, spun to 14,000 rpm at the end, making nearly
00:01:1980 horsepower. Top speeding in the 180 mile an hour range. Just a magnificent,
00:01:27wonderful, complex, constantly evolved race bike of the 1950s at a time when, you know, Guzzi was
00:01:35was doing well with its lay down single chain drive. They were so light and handy and had
00:01:42raw torque, so they were like a piece of paper being rushed around the circuit by a quite
00:01:49moderate engine. So anyway, let's talk about this thing, you know. Kevin, you've done a lot
00:01:58of reading on this subject over decades, I would imagine. Who could resist? Yeah.
00:02:05Well, the thing to realize first is how much Guzzi accomplished with its horizontal
00:02:18single cylinder engines. They just kept making them lighter and they never lost track of the
00:02:23fact that they had to accelerate. They didn't build for top speed, they built for wide range
00:02:30acceleration so that while four cylinder bikes or DKW's two stroke triple were revving their guts
00:02:42out, the single was just chugging off those corners like crazy. So then they built this inline
00:02:54four with the engine crankshaft longitudinal like an old FN single or a Henderson.
00:03:03And the engine looked like a miniature Offenhauser. It was a beautiful little four
00:03:11cylinder double overhead cam engine and they tried it out in 53 and 54 and it just was
00:03:20not what the doctor ordered. So
00:03:27chief engineer Giulio Cesare Carcano looked at the competition, which was originally Jalera
00:03:37and then MV added in 1950. And he thought, we're not going to build a four because those two
00:03:47companies have a big head start in that area. We're not going to build a six because it's going
00:03:56to be quite wide. Mind you, this is going to be a 500. So that meant it had to be a V8.
00:04:07It would be the crankshaft width would be something like 13 and a half inches
00:04:13with bearings and accessories outboard of that. And the cylinder dimensions were 44 by 41. Anyone
00:04:22who's read up on Honda's very successful early four cylinder 250s knows those dimensions 44 by
00:04:3241 because that's what Honda ended up with as well. The crank cases and the covers were made
00:04:40of magnesium and the typical wall thickness of material was four millimeters, which is like
00:04:50three sixteenths of an inch. So good quality casting techniques. And they started out with
00:04:59a crankshaft made in one piece with hardened journals with split rods and split main bearings
00:05:06assembled over it. And then the crank case was open on both ends so you could slide the
00:05:14crankshaft in, lift it up to the center three main bearings and do up the caps.
00:05:22And then the outer main bearings were on the outer covers.
00:05:26They decided, or I should say, well, they, Carcano, Enrico Cantoni, and the man that
00:05:39built those lovely Guzzi V-twins, Dr. Wittner, knew so well during his time at Moto Guzzi,
00:05:48Umberto Todoro. And those three men were the designers of the V-8.
00:05:58They chose to avoid the whole question of head gaskets by screwing the cylinder liners into the
00:06:06heads. There were two heads. The liner screwed in. When the cylinder heads went in,
00:06:15the liner screwed in. When the cylinder heads with the cylinders attached were removed,
00:06:20you could see the entire water jacket, whether it was accumulating crud or not.
00:06:28And the valve angle was a surprisingly modern 58 degrees. Well, not surprising for Guzzi,
00:06:37they'd been using 58 degrees since the 1930s. While everyone else in Italy was using at least
00:06:4590 degrees, the valves were widely splayed apart on MV and on Jalaris.
00:06:52And for cooling, right? Opening up the top of the head for cooling. And also they were using,
00:06:59uh, they're really sticking the flow to the chamber and bringing it in and
00:07:05swirling it around as the Hemi folks did for a very long time. And, uh,
00:07:14the strange part about this whole program is that it was so small because today we think of,
00:07:24uh, for example, Ducati showing up at Superbike races in the nineties, late nineties,
00:07:31with, uh, boxes and boxes of engines fresh off the dyno in the truck, ready to go. That was
00:07:39not the case. Um, when Bill Lomas, uh, kind of a combination engineer and actually competitive
00:07:49rider, uh, had his go at the V8, uh, he, I'm getting ahead of myself here.
00:08:06Anyway, back to the engine. Um, they gave it four speeds. Initially, it would later have,
00:08:13uh, a greater number of speeds, but for a lot of racetracks, they found it was quicker to have
00:08:20just four speeds because there would be less shifting time. And initially the engine was
00:08:27made to run at 12,000 RPM and it made horsepower that was competitive with the existing force.
00:08:45But then they decided that they weren't getting anywhere with the split bearings,
00:08:52split bearings, and, uh, split rods, split and bolted. So they switched to a pressed together
00:09:00crankshaft. And the difficulty there, uh, they started out with 180 degree crankshaft
00:09:09and they broke the studs supporting the center three main bearings. So they decided to switch
00:09:18to a 90 degree crank pin arrangement so that they could, uh, take some load off of those studs.
00:09:26With the pressed together crankshaft, the engine could run to 12,000 RPM
00:09:33and they were able to get quite a lot of testing done.
00:09:38Um, I know where, what I was going to speak of a moment ago, which was that Lomas,
00:09:45when he came on the scene, said they had two bikes and another engine.
00:09:54That's not enough, but they had approximately an 11 man race team and they were making all
00:10:03these parts themselves. They even made the carburetors to, uh, Del Oro's design.
00:10:11Tiny little 20 millimeters at first and later on in 57, uh, 22 millimeters. So, uh,
00:10:22Lomas was not a popular man wherever he went, uh, because he would say,
00:10:29oh, incidentally, I think you might do this to your advantage. And he would show that the lap
00:10:36times were better, but the design team wanted to justify their paychecks. So they just kept it
00:10:44theirs. And so there was always a lot of tension. There was a tension field around Lomas. And
00:10:54anyway, the engine, they couldn't get somebody to make them a Magneto that would produce 800
00:11:01sparks per second. So they went with a coil and battery system. And on each cylinder head
00:11:09was a camshaft driven, rather large, uh, contact breaker housing, each one containing four contact
00:11:18breakers, one for each cylinder. You know, this is, this goes into setup and tuning,
00:11:23you know, what we used to have to do all the time and setting up four contact breakers and
00:11:28making sure that the lobes are perfect so that the spark timing is perfect. I mean, it's a,
00:11:33it's a machining operation and they're running them off the end of the cams, uh, which, which
00:11:39is fine because the cams aren't that long, but if you get a long cam, you would get some torsional,
00:11:44uh, vibration potentially that might, might scatter your spark. We don't even know what
00:11:49spark scatter is anymore. And a coil per cylinder. I love that. That's, that's so modern.
00:11:56Yes, because today we have, we have them integrated with the plug cap. So it's spends
00:12:01its life down in a deep hole in the center of the cylinder head and, uh, no one ever sees it
00:12:07or the spark plug. Don't even think of it. Yeah. No. So like the current, uh, Ducati
00:12:15MotoGP engines, the V8 had thin, delicate drilled for lightness cam drive gears on one end of the
00:12:26crankshaft. And they made that characteristic, uh, Mickey Mouse ears shape. It's such a beautiful
00:12:35view on that side. It suggests so much. And that's, this is why I've always liked shrink wrapped
00:12:44looking castings that reveal the nature of what is there. I'm going to go on record and
00:12:51disappoint the producer right now of our podcast and say that we're standby for photos. We're
00:12:57going to run some pictures of this V8 in this podcast because it's totally worth it. This is
00:13:03gorgeous. Yeah. The, uh, gearbox and clutch, uh, were quite conventional. It had a, a drum,
00:13:13uh, drum selection and multi-plate dry clutch, quite large in diameter.
00:13:23Our Italian contributor, uh, for Cycleworld in the early 1960s, Carlo Pirelli had said, yes,
00:13:29they did indeed try four or five and six speeds. And in his words, the six speed was useless
00:13:36because it slowed the bike down. The bike had plenty of torque. It was really noted for its
00:13:40torque. As you had said about the other Moto Guzzi's developing torque, now you have a V8.
00:13:45And, uh, that was one of the key characteristics of the power plant. Well, Bill Lomas said that
00:13:52pulled from seven. Which is where the Manx's were signing off and had higher,
00:14:00a Manx at 7,000 RPM would have a higher piston speed than the Guzzi V8 at 14. Yeah.
00:14:09So, uh, this is a 5,000 RPM torque band. Now, if you look at superbikes,
00:14:19you will see typically 1,500 RPM. And that is to work with the six speed. All modern
00:14:26motorcycles pretty much have six speeds. And so this, uh, engine shared the characteristic
00:14:36of the four cylinder racers, the four cylinder 500s, of which it was said, and I think of the
00:14:43Jalera, that, um, on occasion, one of the mechanics would start one and ride down to
00:14:50the smoke shop for cigarettes because they, they were very tractable. They weren't high
00:14:58RPM screamers with an inch wide power band. So there's also a picture in Bill Lomas's book,
00:15:06which I recommend, um, showing him holding the V8 standing up, holding it up.
00:15:15Um, doesn't look like he's under any strain. Oh, magnesium. I mean,
00:15:22it's total weight was under 300 pounds for the bicycle.
00:15:26Hmm. Well,
00:15:31problem is the other manufacturers had put in four or five years to make their bikes
00:15:38deal with the Norton's with their wonderful new twin loop chassis and hydraulic damped suspension.
00:15:46And as it turns out, Guzzi didn't have that long. So the list of failures, they had big end
00:15:55failures. They had tappets coming loose. They had overheating. Um, a water pump stopped working.
00:16:05These are all things which are taken care of by the test team. Moto Guzzi didn't have a test team.
00:16:13That kind of structure was just too big for companies making motorcycles in those days.
00:16:20And this is something that, um, the Japanese manufacturers with their large volumes were
00:16:27able to bring to motorcycle sport that, um, had never been there before. Well,
00:16:35leaving out NSU and DKW, both of whom had monster race teams in the fifties.
00:16:42So the engine was a, a wonderful, ambitious thing. Let's just believe that if we leap off of this
00:16:54cliff into empty space, that we will reach safety and everything will be well. And they came close
00:17:05to making the thing reliable. They got two of them to finish the TT.
00:17:12Not very high up. I think one of them was fourth. So that would imply some
00:17:22limitation of performance in the interest of finishing the race. By that time, they were using
00:17:29a German made Hirth crankshaft. Hirth had also made the roller crankshafts for Mercedes-Benz,
00:17:38um, 600 horsepower racers, uh, W125 before the war.
00:17:47This type of crankshaft was assembled out of many sections joined together by radial
00:17:55face splines. You would press the end of one crank pin against the corresponding spline
00:18:03on the face of an adjacent flywheel and inside a differential threaded
00:18:10bolt would draw them together under tremendous pressure.
00:18:16So why did they go to the Hirth crankshaft, which was quite expensive? And why did they
00:18:22only order two? Because the pressed together crankshaft was sort of iffy at 12,000. And Lomas,
00:18:33who had ridden the motorcycle quite a bit and who had an analytical engineering mind,
00:18:41he grew up in a household where his dad worked for Rolls-Royce.
00:18:45He knew that as the tach needle flew up to 12,000, that it wasn't slowing down.
00:18:55And so as far as he was concerned, there was another 2,000 RPM good performance in there. If
00:19:01only they had a crankshaft that was solidly reliable. And the valve gear was good to 15 at
00:19:09least, right? Didn't they test? That's what they rig tested, which is a little different because
00:19:14the crankshaft is... Once you connect the valve gear to a running engine, you've introduced all
00:19:22that boom, boom, boom of... Other vibration, every cylinder firing. We tend to think of,
00:19:30oh, it's turning 7,000 RPM and it's this very smooth operation or 14,000 RPM. But
00:19:36every time the power hits and every time it's coming up against compression, there are all
00:19:40these things that are slightly varying the speed of the rotational speed of the crankshaft, which
00:19:45would be why Yamaha did the 90 degree... The cross-plane four-cylinder in MotoGP so that
00:19:54to keep two cylinders from stopping at the top and the other two from stopping at the bottom in a 180,
00:19:59which was causing a variation in crank speed that a rider would ultimately feel in traction at the
00:20:05rear wheel. So there's lots of... And not traction. Or not traction, yes. That is more accurate.
00:20:12Good job. So 15,000 RPM. I guess my question for you then would be, so the original crankshaft
00:20:22was a single piece and then they're putting rollers that are split over that and they were
00:20:26having problems with that, right? So they had a single piece crank. Then they had to go to the
00:20:33pressed together crankshaft. So pressed together means you get a circular bearing and then your rod
00:20:38has no bolts because you can put it on the shaft and then press... Solid rod, yes. Solid rod and you can
00:20:44just put the stuff together as you would on an RD350 or, you know, any number of those. Incidentally,
00:20:49the C-series R2800 large aircraft radial, I flew in twin engine planes in my youth that had
00:21:012800 power. And this crankshaft was made in three pieces and it was assembled by means of
00:21:11Kervic couplings, trademark. But basically a radial face spline, only optimized to prevent
00:21:20fatigue failure. So here is this tremendous engine with 18 cylinders all thumping away on
00:21:28two crank pins and the whole thing is assembled out of pieces. The crankshaft was in three pieces
00:21:35so that the master rods could be in one piece. And a lot of these things were still being worked
00:21:43out in the 1950s. It's interesting to note that the idea of screwing the cylinder liners into the
00:21:51cylinder head as a means of avoiding having to have all those studs and bolts and compressive
00:21:59force on the cylinder in order to keep the head gasket there, sort of like stepping on the cat's
00:22:05tail to keep it from running out the door. Let's just do away with the gasket. Let's screw the
00:22:14cylinder liners into the head. And it was Aurelio Lampredi at Ferrari who first did this
00:22:22in the 1951 with Ferrari's four-cylinder two-liter engine, which dominated European
00:22:31racing in 52 and 53, something that you can bet Carcano and his men knew all about.
00:22:42So not that they copied, but that the other fellow showed that it could work.
00:22:47Yeah. Well, I wonder about the culture at that time because you had Ferrari and you had all
00:22:54this stuff in the Motor Valley coming to be. And then you had Guzzi up in sleepy Lake Como.
00:23:04Lake Como. Mandello, yeah.
00:23:06Mandello DeLario. I mean, I'm sure they got together and they were at race circuits and
00:23:13all that, but you wonder about the mix of the culture and who's talking to whom and et cetera,
00:23:20how the ideas are spreading around and where you get a whiff of the inside look at how that's made,
00:23:25like a guy at the foundry or- Oh yeah, that's-
00:23:29I'd like to swing by. Going through the back door.
00:23:31Yeah, I'd like to swing by. Because that door is a prolific
00:23:33source of information. It's also said that had they continued in 58, that Carcano intended
00:23:42to use a forged one-piece crankshaft with plain bearings.
00:23:48Why did they quit? Imagine that. Oh, geez.
00:23:51They quit because of the Fiat 500s. Yeah.
00:23:55Yeah. Once European auto factories got going on affordable cars,
00:24:05English families were no longer having to put up with an aerial square four with a wicker sidecar
00:24:12for the trip down to Bognor Regis. Oh, the sidecars of that era in England,
00:24:18they were so complete. They were like small cars themselves.
00:24:21Yes. They were enclosed,
00:24:23they had windows, beautiful interiors, velour and velvet. I mean, what a thing it was.
00:24:34Indeed. But once the mini hit, forget it, man.
00:24:38Yeah. So what happened at the end of 57 is that the Italian industry had made a mass bug out from
00:24:48racing. So after that, only MV was left standing. And that was partly because MV had become a
00:24:59helicopter company. They had a license. They weren't really selling transportation
00:25:03at that point, right? They were building helicopters. They were immune from the
00:25:08vagaries of the market. The disappearing motorcycle market.
00:25:12Yeah. So some people have claimed that the Guzzi V8 had severe handling problems.
00:25:22And Lomas' story has it that Ken Cavanaugh, a respected Australian racer, had a thing about
00:25:32the V8 that he was expecting the worst from it at all times. And Lomas was used to doing
00:25:39back-to-back testing. Okay, now with the rear wheel moved back five millimetres. Okay, now 10
00:25:46millimetres. And scientific method. And in this one test, they were trying to stabilize the V8.
00:25:59And he had asked his mechanic, Pomi, to bring some lead sheeting, which I suspect was
00:26:12roofing. And they affixed, Pomi affixed 20 pounds of this to the front of the frame.
00:26:20And it was more stable. It was better. So then Lomas said, Ken, do you have a way to move it
00:26:29forward? Well, yes, we can do that. They moved it to the front fairing stay.
00:26:37And Lomas said, it felt sort of heavy at low speeds. But on the racetrack, it was more stable
00:26:47again. Well, he had tried another seat to give himself a little more room. It moved him back
00:26:54on the bike. Yes, yes. Being a longer-legged fellow, he asked for a longer seat. It made
00:27:02the motorcycle less stable. Because, I mean, Guzzi paid attention and moved the weight forward
00:27:09on the motorcycle in doing this. And everyone was figuring out, as you had with the Manx.
00:27:15There's a wonderful photo, also from the 50s, showing Jeff Duke on the Jalera with three inches
00:27:26of packing between his butt and the seat stop. So that is something that crew chiefs everywhere
00:27:34have three inches of packing somewhere in their kit. A tradition carried on today. You always
00:27:41tell the story of Matt Maladon and his crew chief, Peter Doyle. Willow, yeah. Willow,
00:27:49stacking them up on there, getting them over the front makes a difference. And I would see
00:27:57in races, for example, the US Grand Prix that used to be at Laguna Seca. Here comes Wayne Rainey.
00:28:04He, you can see him at a point in turn 11, pull himself all the way forward. And he's holding
00:28:12himself there with his arms as the motorcycle accelerates. This is one of those two-stroke
00:28:21explode-off-the-corner jobs. And this is why people racing those motorcycles had heart rates
00:28:31up to 180, because they were working hard. They were jumping all over the motorcycle,
00:28:38and they still are today. If you watch the videos, you'll see that it is really
00:28:45sidehorse Olympics with a 300-horsepower engine added. So I thought that it was
00:28:54excellent that Lomas included that about the relationship between stability and weight on
00:29:00the front wheel, because it remains true today. The heart rate thing reminds me of a conversation
00:29:08I had with a guy many years ago, like a sports physician who was working with riders. And he was
00:29:15instrumenting riders during the rivalry days of Max Biaggi and Valentino Rossi. And I mean,
00:29:21you can imagine what I say next is Biaggi was like 200 heart rate. Like you could just,
00:29:29his personality is that, right? Like the keyed-up guy. And Rossi was like, oh, 170.
00:29:35His heart rate was much lower. It was a really interesting conversation. But yeah, it's a lot
00:29:40of work. So what Moto Guzzi needed was time in which to find the right place for the engine,
00:29:51after which they could address the normal handling issues. I think that Lomas said he
00:29:58got the front end to work quite well with the, it had a leading link, short leading link,
00:30:06front fork, and which was very much Guzzi's thing in the 1950s. But end of 57,
00:30:17everything ended for the companies that pulled out and the V8 became a museum piece.
00:30:24And what a wonderful thing, a wonderful sound and over leap, overarching ambition.
00:30:35We can build a V8 and make it win races. Honda talked about possibly needing to build a V8 for
00:30:45the 250 class. But as it turned out, in that case, the end of the 1967 season,
00:30:54the Japanese companies, with the exception of Yamaha, all pulled out of Grand Prix racing.
00:31:00And there was no more need for it. But- And there was, well, I mean,
00:31:05Honda was focusing on cars at that point. So they were really- Yes, they were. Fabulous.
00:31:10As early as 1954, they were planning a truck plant that they were going to build shortly.
00:31:17So the rule in business is if you're not expanding, you're losing, you're shrinking.
00:31:25And so they just kept adding new balloons and blowing into them as hard as they could,
00:31:33and it worked. Guzzi Carcano and his boys were working at just the wrong time.
00:31:47After his employment at Guzzi Carcano became a yacht designer, he
00:31:54could turn his hand to a variety of work. Well, Carlo Pirelli mentioned that in his story,
00:32:00that he liked racing yachts and he had many refinements to his ships, boats, that
00:32:10were quite effective. Yeah. But Carlo starts that story about
00:32:15Carcano sitting at the Italian Grand Prix, and he watches the shaft drive four cylinder come through
00:32:23and watches the rider struggling off and on the throttle because of the effect of the shaft drive.
00:32:29Torque effect, yes. Torque effect of it, both torquing the motorcycle and the torque effect
00:32:34of the pinion riding up and down on the ring gear at the back, which is why- It's pretty comical.
00:32:40Yeah. So if you don't have the four bar linkage that was later used on Guzzi's and also on BMWs,
00:32:49that it would, the early BMWs, even the street bikes with not very much power, you roll it on
00:32:54and it would stand up and you'd roll it off and it would squat down. So he watched the bike,
00:33:00the shaft drive bike come through and they'd had great success with his chain drive 350.
00:33:07And that was, according to Carlo, his basis for saying like, look at him struggle and also
00:33:13watching the four cylinder come through the same corner and not doing well, like,
00:33:20wobbling through the corner and yet turning in a smoking fast lap time.
00:33:26And then he watched his riders come through with what was described as perfect form.
00:33:32On his perfect motorcycle, he said, we need a 500 that handles. And that's where the chain drive,
00:33:38that was their experience with the chain drive. And then V8, you get that, as you said,
00:33:44pointed out earlier, you get that four cylinder width, but you get eight cylinders of multi
00:33:49awesomeness. And I mean, I love an inline six, but it would be wide.
00:33:54Yeah, in a 500 with all those larger cylinders. So
00:34:06the Italian four cylinder builders got a bitter lesson from Norton in 1950 and 51.
00:34:15In 1950, the Norton single written by Jeff Duke nearly took the title and only episodes of
00:34:31tire chunking prevented him from being world champion in 1950. The Norton had a twin loop
00:34:38frame. It had a broad base for its swing arm. It had smooth acting, hydraulic damping front and
00:34:47rear. So the Italians looked at this, they looked at the frames they were putting on their
00:34:55500 four cylinders with little skinny tubing. Something to consider. And friction dampers
00:35:06that worked like a pair of scissors with a tight joint. That was the standard in 1930.
00:35:14And in this case, Rex McCandless showed them in the new Featherbed 1950 chassis that
00:35:22even a weak old 1930s design, like the single cylinder Max Norton, could beat the force
00:35:30because it got around the track better. So the Italians called what happened next, Nortonizing.
00:35:39So the English riders who were hired to ride the force, first Jeff Duke and many others, including
00:35:48John Sertiz, went to Italy with girling units in their luggage and other helpful things from
00:36:03other engineering traditions. And so the Italians, once they caught up,
00:36:11their four cylinder bikes were essentially in an impregnable position.
00:36:19But it can take years because as we know, people are fond of their preconceptions and will defend
00:36:28them even when there is overwhelming evidence that they are a problem. Part of being human.
00:36:38We'd probably be better at marriage as a species if we were able to consider the facts.
00:36:45So it's a grand thing to see this kind of change in our own time. Ducati for years was finishing
00:36:59sixth, seventh, and eighth in MotoGP and couldn't seem to do any better than that.
00:37:07And I think they decided to turn their method on its head. And instead of backing one rider
00:37:22by shaping the machine to suit him, they would build a fleet of motorcycles and put on them
00:37:29the latest graduates from Moto2 and let them learn to ride what was there.
00:37:38And after several years, Ducati has become dominant. So these changes, not only do they occur,
00:37:48but they take time to mature. So if it's impossible to postpone gratification,
00:37:59it may not be very exciting. But if you look closely, you can see these things happening.
00:38:05And I find it tremendously interesting.
00:38:10Same. I enjoy the detail refinements that are sometimes hard to detect,
00:38:16certainly in the era. To get a good look at a Ducati MotoGP bike with the fairing off is
00:38:23almost impossible. There were a couple of points on the Guzzi V8 with some wonderful details like
00:38:33changing the, well, they lengthened the swing arm. I think it was three centimeters at one
00:38:39point. They lengthened the swing arm and they went to an eccentric clamp and it held the rear wheel
00:38:49more steady. That helped them. And then I'm always fascinated because I work on motorcycles and
00:38:58take a drink, folks. Velocettes have a single carburetor, my 500. So you just have a cable.
00:39:02You don't have to synchronize anything. You don't have to worry about opening friction.
00:39:08But then there were twins where they would take a single cable from the grip to a barrel-shaped
00:39:13deal under the tank that had two cables. And then those would run on the top of the carburetors.
00:39:17And then you're syncing the idle with the screws on the sides of the carburetors. And then you're
00:39:22synchronizing the pickup with the length of the cable, fiddly business, doing that over and over
00:39:28again. So they come up together. And my method was always to make sure that initial pickup was
00:39:38as perfect as I could make it. And that the ensuing bottom quarter was bang on
00:39:46because the percentage difference at small throttle openings of that change was significant.
00:39:52And you would get a significant difference in the cylinder. Whereas if you were three quarters,
00:39:57a fraction is such a small percentage of the area that it wasn't nearly as important.
00:40:03Didn't affect the airflow much.
00:40:05Yep. And so you would get a very smooth pickup and you'd get a very smooth
00:40:10cruise that way with a small throttle opening. And these are things on my mind when I look at
00:40:17a picture of a Moto Guzzi V8 and I say eight tiny carburetors beautifully picking,
00:40:22stacked up with their horns crossing in the V. And how the heck do you open all those things
00:40:30exactly at the right time when you want them to open?
00:40:33Well, this is why the carburetors were their open mouths. You couldn't hear them saying anything,
00:40:40but what you would have heard if they spoke louder was, please rack mount us
00:40:48so that we could be operated by one cable operating.
00:40:51They were, but that's what's beautiful about it is they were operated by a single cable.
00:40:55There's a big arm that goes over one of the banks and it has a linkage and these
00:41:02cute little hooked, they're almost like a rocker followers. They're almost like follower,
00:41:08yeah, rocker arms. They are rocker arms, finger followers. And they've got little holes drilled
00:41:12in them. And there's one arm that goes over where the cable connects. And then the linkage
00:41:19is all over top. And it was described as having a very light throttle.
00:41:25The Moto Guzzi V8 with eight 20 or 22 millimeter
00:41:29Dell'Orto carburetors. They did work on the floats, right?
00:41:33They changed the floats to change the way the engine.
00:41:35That was a,
00:41:39Triumph and BSA had a problem here too. When they put GP carburetors on their triples,
00:41:45they tried to have a large float chamber at one side and they had the same problems
00:41:51that Moto Guzzi did. Moto Guzzi started with one big cylindrical
00:41:57float chamber. It didn't flow enough. So they added a second one.
00:42:01And as Bill Lomas says in his book, depending on whether you were cornering to the right
00:42:08or cornering to the left, you might have it pick up nicely and accelerate, or it might go,
00:42:14did you want something? And so it was begging for eight tiny float chambers that were
00:42:24tucked into the interstices between all those carburetors.
00:42:28Quite a wonderful intake system.
00:42:32Yeah. I mean, the concentric idea, the AMO concentric,
00:42:38making the float bowl concentric to the main jet.
00:42:43Oscar Hedstrom, 1903.
00:42:46Amazing.
00:42:46So he did it first in the US. And I think that one of the Germans did it first in Europe.
00:42:56And it's an idea that's still with us.
00:42:59Yeah. Because my personal experience is pre-unit triumph with a monoblock and the monoblock,
00:43:06the float bowl is offset.
00:43:08Lumped on one side, yes.
00:43:09It's a lump on the side of the carburetor. And so they work pretty good, but if you
00:43:15throw it on the side stand, it doesn't like it too much, at least not on my bike.
00:43:20Yeah.
00:43:20And depending on which way you're leaning, it would be lean or it could be rich because the
00:43:26flat height of the fuel was dipping below if you turned it, say to the right,
00:43:31and it was going up too high. And if the float level is higher, you're getting more fuel
00:43:36per signal and changing the mixture. And that was the great progress that the concentric brought
00:43:42because jet, float bowl, lean the bike and the fuel is in the center of the float and it
00:43:49stays roughly similar and you get pretty good running. You can even park your commando on
00:43:53the side stand if you want to be so audacious and it might continue to idle. Hard to say.
00:44:00And the tire isn't soft.
00:44:02Yes. But yeah, the tiny little matchbox floats on each one of those at the end.
00:44:09Another point on the Gucci V8 is that the normal tire fit was a 275 front and a 300 rear,
00:44:20which is what Yamaha TD1 250s came with in 1965. And it was widely believed in Europe
00:44:34that if you put on bigger tires, that you would slow your motorcycle down.
00:44:40And Carcano was able to show that the little narrow tires were not a handicap on the horizontal
00:44:49singles. And that performance in rain was of course much better because the narrower the tire,
00:44:56the more resistant to hydroplaning. So I think what...
00:45:07It's easy to see the Gucci V8 as a kind of tragedy in the Greek sense that someone attempts
00:45:15boldly launches a program and for a variety of reasons it comes a cropper.
00:45:22It doesn't produce results. Oh, boo hoo. But
00:45:30what was going to happen very shortly, this was 57, by 61 Honda would be winning 250 championships
00:45:41one after another with the same basic notion. Let's put together a bunch of 44 by 41
00:45:49boring stroke cylinders and see what we can do with it. So the idea of cylinder multiplication,
00:45:58which was kicked off in a big way by Carcano and his boys, they didn't have the R&D oomph
00:46:08to make it happen, but it happened very soon afterwards. So it was definitely going in the
00:46:16right direction. Those men weren't wrong. They were just underfunded.
00:46:25Just wishing so much that it had continued to plain bearings.
00:46:30Yeah. Because they could have run the engine to any speed they liked.
00:46:36Think of it. I mean, think of 1964 with a Moto Guzzi V8 and development time
00:46:44and progress. I mean, it's just what a thing it would have been.
00:46:50Well, we know that Honda with their... You could almost say that the NR500 was
00:46:58a V8 with its pairs of pistons fused into one oval piston. And each cylinder had
00:47:10eight valves, just as though it were two independent cylinders. And they were able
00:47:17And they were able to get that thing to make 136 horsepower at 19,000 RPM at the very end.
00:47:27And it didn't ever win a single Grand Prix point, but Honda were willing to put
00:47:35huge effort into it. Three different marks of oval piston V4 were built and tested and
00:47:47taken to the races. They did their damnedest. It wasn't going to happen because they had
00:47:53stepped onto the two-stroke escalator at a point where it was going up too steeply.
00:47:59The two-strokes could add more power a lot more cheaply than a four-stroke manufacturer could do
00:48:06it. Because in order to add power with a four-stroke, you have to rev it up more, which
00:48:11means all the usual headaches. So again, bad timing. We need more time.
00:48:28But I think that it's great to listen to the music of those engines, which you can have on
00:48:36recording or you can get it on the internet and listen to it. Because there is the song of the
00:48:44future being sent from 1957. Your time comment made me think of, who was that fellow who was
00:48:57the Indian tuner? He tuned Indian race engines. Oh, C.P. Franklin. No, no. In recent times,
00:49:05like vintage race, that guy with the H-beam connecting rods and... Shoot, what is his name?
00:49:13I don't remember his name, but he was... Bob Nichols. Bob Nichols. So Nichols was sort of
00:49:20in his 80s, I think. Yeah, when I first started talking to him, he was. And frantically
00:49:26developing vintage Indian engines. For the Scout. Yeah, the Scout. And just,
00:49:34I mean, buried in it and frantic about it. And that's what he said.
00:49:41There isn't enough time. He just wanted to keep doing it. I admire that so much.
00:49:50At one point, he phoned and he said, I've done it. I was able to buy a big base bottom end.
00:49:58And the big base was, had a sort of crankcase extension to the rear at the bottom so that
00:50:08when the whirling crankshaft threw off oil, it had some place to go rather than being thrown
00:50:13up into the rear cylinder, which would smoke and foul plugs. And it also provided a place
00:50:22from which the scavenge pump could pick up the used oil from the engine and recirculate it to
00:50:29the tank. Bob Nichols was a Douglas engineer for years and years. And he was in three plane
00:50:40crashes during World War II and survived them all. In one case, he had to swim seven miles
00:50:49to an island that he saw out his side window as the transport plane with its engines going
00:50:58spot, pop, bang, descended into the Pacific. So he thought, well, I'll give it a try.
00:51:07He said, they came and got me after a few days. Amazing.
00:51:12So I was thinking back. Yes. No, go ahead. He described being at a casual luncheon one day where
00:51:24everyone there, as he told it, except himself, was a major contributor to American racing,
00:51:32among whom foremost was Leo Goossen, who had, I think, started with Miller in like 1919.
00:51:42And was still designing stuff right to the end of his life.
00:51:51And Dick O'Brien was like that too. Yeah. Because what else are you going to do? Sit on the porch,
00:52:00facing the sunset with a rug over your knees? Yeah. I called O.B. to interview him many years
00:52:06ago. And he was in Florida. And he said, you know, he was legendary, legendarily profane,
00:52:14just cussing his punctuation. And he said something along the lines of, you know,
00:52:19I come down here to Florida to rest up and da, da, da, da. And they just send me these goddamn
00:52:26NASCAR hats. It was awesome. Very cool. I was just thinking, I was trying to think of the
00:52:37connection of Moto Guzzi's Inline 4. And it was the guy, it was an engineer called Giannini.
00:52:45Yes. Giannini went way back. He was one of the Rondine, or Rondine, as we would also say. He
00:52:52was one of the Rondine guys who did the Inline 4. We did a podcast on that. And that Rondine
00:52:58became the Gilera. And he had helped design that, or did design that longitudinal Inline 4.
00:53:06Yes, that's right. I forgot that. With the shaft drive that they threw away.
00:53:16But again, it's that culture, you know, the Italian engineering racing culture,
00:53:20and everybody's mixing around and trading jobs. And I'm going over here to do this,
00:53:24and I have these ideas. Well, the VA came into being in just a few months.
00:53:33They had the idea that they laid out how they wanted it to be. And they just built it. No
00:53:40committees. The big cheese, Perotti, said, let's do it. And so soon, he could hear it run.
00:53:51And that is why outfits like Lockheed had to create things such as the Skunk Works,
00:54:01which had carefully been designed to remove social friction.
00:54:09Social friction, committee meetings, memos. They just put everyone together.
00:54:19And they found that taking engineers off of a project made it move forward faster. So,
00:54:29I think, probably,
00:54:35Carcano and his boys got the thing running faster than the modern companies would be able to do,
00:54:42because they definitely have this internal friction. What they didn't have was a test team
00:54:49and an R&D operation backing it up. And what are those 12 boxes? Those engines are obsolete.
00:54:57The good stuff's already on the truck. Oh, good. Yep. Because it takes a lot of hardware to support
00:55:07a racing effort. Oh, this engine is wrecked. Put in another one. 20 minutes later,
00:55:14you're running in practice again. Now, one of the problems that they had repeatedly with the V8 was
00:55:22big end failure. So, they decided to increase oil flow by putting oil into both ends of the
00:55:29crankshaft. End feed is a standard method of oiling Formula One and other kinds of race engines.
00:55:39Because, in that case, centrifugal force works for you. The oil enters at the center and
00:55:49flings itself outward. Whereas, if you're trying to force oil into a bearing
00:55:59from the oil supply into a main bearing by grooving the bearing shell, so the oil holes are
00:56:06always under pressure. Forcing oil into the crankshaft so that the drilling can carry it to
00:56:12the next crank pin. Centrifugal force is saying, no way. And I put centrifugal force in quotes
00:56:20because, of course, your high school physics prof will explain to you that centrifugal force
00:56:27does not exist. What's happening is simply that the inertia of what is being forced into a circle,
00:56:35the inertia wants it to just keep going in a straight line.
00:56:40So, double end oil feeding, cylinders screwed into the cylinder head,
00:56:49narrow valve angle. One after another, lovely modern innovations that are with us to this day
00:56:59did appear on the good CV8. And there was the reason for these failures, which everyone has
00:57:09listed, and for the fact that it never won a Grand Prix, is that it had to, they basically,
00:57:17like a club racer, they took it to the track to work on it. And that won't work at the top level.
00:57:26You've got to be confident as a result of many testing that we have ignition,
00:57:36the thing is going to lift off and soon it'll be sparkling in the sky downrange.
00:57:42But still, does anybody go to bed early at the racetrack? I mean, honestly, no. You could come
00:57:48in with all the confidence in the world and you're still panicked, aren't you? I mean...
00:57:53Well, of course, they try to avoid that. That's why Bud Axlin, who worked with Kenny all those
00:57:58years developing cylinders and pipes and so forth, said, I don't mind doing an all-nighter.
00:58:08He said, they're a part of racing. But he said, I sure don't want to live there.
00:58:13Yeah. Yeah, I have to say, racing in Arma last fall on that BMW, Dan Mays, that I borrowed,
00:58:22R75-5, it had had, I think he had raced it for 12 years. So it had,
00:58:29and it was previously raced by a friend of his and he bought it from him and it was just developed.
00:58:35You know, and it also isn't, you know, it wasn't trying to make 100 horsepower. It made really
00:58:3970, really nice horsepower. And it'll do that for a long time. You know, it's not going to scatter
00:58:44and it's competitive and repeatable. And it was such a repeatable motorcycle. It did everything
00:58:51the same every time I rode it. I didn't change any suspension damping. I didn't change carburetor
00:58:58adjustments, nothing. And so in that sense, it was very nice to show up with a developed motorcycle,
00:59:05even though it wasn't making 110 horsepower or anything like that. You know, it's not Grand Prix,
00:59:11it's Arma, it's different, but it's good to be, yeah, it's good to be prepared.
00:59:18Sit on it and go.
00:59:21What a magnificent, yes.
00:59:23There can be so many steps to reach that point. And Guzzi didn't have the organization,
00:59:31the funding or the time, but it was a fabulous effort.
00:59:36And it did bear fruit, just not the fruit they'd hoped for.
00:59:40Yeah. Double overhead cam, 90 degree, liquid cooled, V8, narrow valve angle,
00:59:50pushed up forward in the frame. They lengthened the swing arm.
00:59:56Yep.
00:59:56They pushed the rider forward. They had different fairings. They had problems with the dolphin
01:00:01fairing versus the full fairing. But I don't know, another, I guess not, I don't think of it as a
01:00:10failure. You know, you do want to build a race bike and win races, but in the same way with,
01:00:14as you mentioned with the Honda, there's a magnificent exploration there. And I think,
01:00:21don't you think with a little more development, they would have done it?
01:00:24In 58 for sure.
01:00:28The same basic thing happened with TZ750, which we've also spoken about in these podcasts.
01:00:37Kelker others was asked to go to Japan and test ride the thing before they committed it for the
01:00:451974 Daytona. And when he rode it, it weaved. He couldn't reach top speed because it began to
01:00:56at two or three cycles per second. So what did they do? They lengthened the swing arm
01:01:05and that's the way they stabilized it.
01:01:07And Agostini rode the thing at Daytona. The exhaust pipes all blew apart.
01:01:17He finished the race in first place. Kenny Roberts was second, having broken a cylinder bolt.
01:01:25I should call it a nut. Those bolts, those nuts were cracking on quite a few TZ750s and
01:01:34there was an immediate warranty on it. So the same kinds of problems are encountered
01:01:44all the way through history of the motorcycle.
01:01:49Well, thanks for listening folks. That's the Moto Guzzi V8. Thanks again to our sponsor,
01:01:54Octane Lending. I really enjoyed this one because I've always loved the Guzzi V8 and it was
01:02:03really fun to read up on it and explore and then to get, of course, all of your
01:02:09research as well to put this together. It's just, what a wonderful thing it was.
01:02:15It's unfortunate that during this podcast, we didn't have the sound of the V8 rising and falling
01:02:23in the background and turning to see what it could be. Well, we'll leave something to the
01:02:31rest of the internet to provide. I'm just glad to throw a couple pictures. We have some great
01:02:37photographs, original press photos from Moto Guzzi of the bare engine and some other stuff that
01:02:44will get slid into the production. Thanks for listening folks. We have a full complement of
01:02:51back podcasts, more than 60 episodes. You can listen on the Rondine TZ750,
01:02:59how to dissipate heat, disc brakes, how suspension damping works.
01:03:05It's hopefully infinite. Yes. So far, so good. Yep. Thanks for listening.