Barry Jones

Written by Barry Jones
September 2019

The Story of Moto Guzzi Engine Number: KA000111

Don’t ask the factory to confirm the number, as they tell me it doesn’t exist and the engine must have come out of the experimental department. However, it must have existed because Guzzi approached Ted to buy it back some years later.

The history of this special motorcycle at times appears to be shrouded in folklore. Many people I have spoken to can’t accurately recall the first years, so I’ll throw to the ether the stories I have heard from first, second and third hand accounts, and possibly imaginary ones. This is a plea to all involved in those early years to enlighten those of us who are enthusiastic about completing the story. Any corrections to facts and dates are welcome, as are tales of grandeur, and of woe.

Construction

The earliest story I heard was of Ted scoring the engine and transmission from the factory. The story goes that Ted got wind from persons unknown that Dr John [Wittner] was working in the factory developing four valve heads and that six engines had been assembled with the newly developed top end. I hear the story now that there was only four made, can anybody clarify this please? So, Ted high-tailed it to the factory where he acquired one of these engines, along with a complete transmission.

With his booty, he visited Arturo Magni who took on the job of building the chassis. Folklore says this was completed in two weeks and the bike was then flown to the US where it competed in the Battle of the Twins at Daytona. I don’t have any dates for this series of events, all I know is it is likely to be in the period 1988 to 1989, any help will be appreciated.

Early Competition

I believe Owen Coles was the rider at this time and was lapping in a competitive position at Daytona when poor tyre choice saw the bike fail to negotiate a corner. Ted toured parts of the US with the bike but I have no information about this. The story follows that Ted returns to Perth and successfully raced the bike in local events before flying it to New Zealand to compete in a couple of events. I heard they took the Magni on the Saturday night of a road race meeting, to a drag race meeting, where they acquitted themselves admirably. As far as I know Owen Coles didn’t return to Australia with Ted as he took up an offer of a ride with Ducati Europe, I don’t recall him ever returning. The responsibility of racing the Magni now fell to Simon Turner, an affable Kiwi and excellent rider who carried the genes of his uncle, Keith Turner, Barry Sheene’s team mate in the seventies.

I first saw Ted’s bike at Moto Italiano in 1990 or 1991, along with many Guzzisti, it was a real hit. I don’t recall the bike being raced on the east coast at that time. The next time I saw the Magni it was racing at Bathurst. Unfortunately the clutch was spread across a blanket on the ground! Thereby ends my knowledge of the tale, the following story continues on with the Magni permanently posited on the east coast and being used for promotional purposes, as well as racing.

Caretaker of Prototype #1

I’m often asked the question of how I got my hands on a unique motorcycle that’s revered by many. I can honestly say there was no skulduggery involved because you need to be clever to be a good liar or you’ll get caught out, and I ain’t that clever! Just let it be said that I believe success in life is created by two factors; the first is hard work and the second is luck, both in relatively equal proportions. I don’t like the word ‘owner’, I am presently the caretaker of this example of Magni and Guzzi history.

Sometime following the parting of Ted Stolarski, his partner Dulcie, known as Mrs S, rang me and offered me the Magni at ‘a price I couldn’t refuse’. It wasn’t cheap, I paid it off over a period of time. Dulcie explained that Ted wanted me to end up with the bike to thank me for all the work we at Italian Motorcycle Engineering had done in promoting Guzzi in Melbourne in the previous ten years; and also for racing our Moto Guzzi successfully on the east coast in BEARS and Post Classic classes of racing.

Connection With The Stolarski’s

Our relationship with the Stolarski family had blossomed when Ted invited me to travel with himself and Mario Poggioli to the factory to meet the sales staff and the engineers, including Umberto Todero and Dr John Wittner. Following that was a visit to Samarate to meet Arturo and Giovanni Magni. At some stage during this trip we also met with Simon Turner and his uncle, Keith Turner, at their hotel in Como. Simon travelled with us for the day, experiencing the most disappointing visit to the Gilera factory and museum; it closed for good the day before!

Subsequent to this time spent together Ted welcomed our family home as his base of operations on the east coast where at the day’s end he enjoyed a beer in front of the open fire and entertaining our young children. However, the beer couldn’t be too cold … Ted didn’t like it cold. Sadly this relationship was too short. Ted passed away in September 1994.

1993 – 1994

The bike was raced on the east coast by A-1 Motorcycles, one of the Melbourne dealerships at the time. The other dealership was Mick Hone Motorcycles. Steve Brouggy, one of the partners in A-1 rode the bike in open events. Steve is a great rider but was clearly outclassed in the performance stakes. The bike was repainted in the red livery we see in all the photos since that time.

The Magni was purchased from Stolarski’s company ‘Transport Holdings Pty Ltd’ in November 1994. The motorcycle was in my workshop at this time as Ted had recently decided the ageing racebike now required an engineer to provide maintenance and further development. As modifications were now our responsibility, development of the ageing machine commenced.

April 1995

The chassis geometries were measured:

Steering angle - 29 deg. 36 min.
Trail - 125 mm
Wheelbase - 1485 mm

The steering was found to be a little pedestrian, so we had the frame was tweaked by Bob Martin Engineering. The steering head angle was pulled in as far as possible without modifying the frame and naturally the forks were slid through the yokes as far as possible. I can’t recall the exact resultant steering angle but 26 degrees and 100 mm trail is close to the mark. The rear wheel offset was found to be almost 30mm, which explained some of the strange handling characteristics associated with left hand corners at high speed circuits like Phillip Island and Bathurst. The offset was necessary to fit the wider rear wheel that had never been considered in the 1960’s gearbox design.

At Phillip Island, Alan Curran observed John Ryan on the Magni from behind being pushed hard through Bass Kink, the top of the rear wheel was oscillating around 30mm sideways from compounding clearances in the swing arm pivots. Even though the spherical rollers were in good condition the movement was unacceptable. The simplest solution for this was to build a conventional box section aluminium swing arm, in the process bringing the rear wheel offset back to 15 mm. The aluminium swingarm fabricated to replace the parallelogram integrated the fully floating bevel drive which was coupled the chassis via connecting rod and rose joints. The rear calliper also floated.

The front and rear suspension was removed and massaged by GP suspension engineer, and famed rider, Garry Flood. The springs and valving were changed and the handling was much improved, especially at high speed circuits. When we received the bike, everything was painted red; we decided to paint the wheels yellow as the first step in returning the bike to its original livery. The repainted bodywork was completed many years later.

May 1995

We tested the standard engine on Phil Tainton’s Dynojet dyno and found the engine in its current state of tune only produced 75 HP at the rear wheel. We removed the base gaskets to get some compression and redialled the camshafts to suit. Some tuning work with ignition timing and jetting brought the power up to 90HP, a significant increase but only 4HP more than a two valve engine we were running. John Ryan, a hot 250 production punter, to his credit rode it to its limits winning the Hartwell BEARS championship that year. As the bike was no longer competitive in open classes, this state of tune remained until April 1997, when we decided to enter open BEARS racing in particular the BEARS support race at the 1997 WSC Phillip Island round. This necessitated some modifications. Craig Bondini our sadly missed long-time friend and brilliant engineer, even if a ‘little’ eccentric, was a long time Guzzi enthusiast. He spent many hours fiddling with the machine and tossing around ideas, he was a great innovator.

October 1996

The engine was freshened up. We fabricated and fitted new cylinder liners, rings, big-end shells and bolts, shot peened and cryogenically treated the conrods and replaced the oil pump with a new standard pump. We fabricated a large crankcase ventilation labyrinth to return oil to the sump and fabricated a windage tray.

New front disc rotors and pads were fitted. We also fitted an IME modified CR gearbox provided by Cameron Rayner, who was good enough to swap his CR gearbox for the Magni’s wide ratio, which suited his two valve road bike better. His two valve engine had 86 rear wheel horsepower and gobs of torque!

November 1996

We replaced the clutch with a standard assembly and the bike was raced locally at club and open events and no problems were evident until …

January 1997

We fitted larger 36mm inlet valves and much improved camshaft profiles as they are gentler and more effective than ‘C kit’ cams, CB4 valve springs and lightened Yamaha retainers. The pistons were fly-cut to suit and the crank assembly balanced. Next was to fit a locally made aluminium flywheel, thanks Ray Jenkins! A crank mounted ignition system was fabricated using Bosch components. This worked brilliantly but sadly it didn’t last and we returned to the Kettering ignition which we still run.

The standard clutch no longer handled the 112 HP now developed at the rear wheel. A 3rd place at the WSBK BEARS support race was managed despite this with great riding from Martin Hone. This was a great result, the race was won by Andrew Stroud on the Britten followed by the Ducati Dealer Team, Martin was catching the Ducati when the race ended. A simple clutch fix found us preloading the standard springs with 1mm shims and fitting four Ducati single clutch springs neatly inside the standard springs. The clutch action is still light with no hint of slippage.

Recent history

The bike continued to be raced at club level through to the mid 2000s when increasing family activity slowed down race activity. The advent of the Broadford Bonanza in the late 2000s then provided a great opportunity to showcase the Magni on an annual basis.

A few years ago a catastrophic engine failure provided the opportunity for a freshen up. Engine components were hydro-blasted and the engine rebuilt. At the time of writing [September 2019] I am still waiting for engine valves to complete the engine rebuild. After much rubbing down and repairing, the bodywork has been restored to its original livery, paintwork is by Ben Raulin.

We reinstalled the parallelogram swingarms in the interest of originality, the bike is unlikely to be raced seriously again owing to its rarity, but will be displayed and demonstrated when possible at open events and shows.

List of Riders

1990: Owen Coles, Simon Turner
1991: Simon Turner
1992: Mark Purdy
1993: Mark Purdy, Wayne Gow, Steve Brouggy
1994: Steve Brouggy, Nick Tomkinson
1995: John Ryan
1996: Martin Hone, Gary Arbrew
1997: Martin Hone
1998-2004: Barry Jones, Alfio Micheli
2012-Current: Ben Jones

An Interesting Note:

Alfio Micheli [Moto Guzzi’s long term test rider, 1974-2009] commenced a demonstration lap at the 2003 Island Classic by pulling an almost vertical mono out of the pits and halfway down the straight; it was jaw dropping! Sadly, the pit straight camera had been turned off for the lunch break. Peter Guest, legendary Australian racer, walked up to the bike back in the pits with eyes wide open and exclaimed, “One day I HAVE TO RIDE THAT THING!!”

Update: P1 breathes again after full engine rebuild

The rebuild took some time, both cylinder heads suffered similar damage with both cam belts being torn apart during the failure. All valves but one were bent severely, the guides survived as did the valve seats. All the cam followers were smashed, the cam lobes damaged and one shaft bent. The pistons fortunately survived.

The cam was straightened and the lobes welded up and reground. John White from Competition Valves was good enough to make me a replacement set of engine valves in stainless steel, a magnificent job, he’s a true artisan. New springs and retainers were fitted. The camshafts were carefully dialled in at the assembly stage.

Teo Lamas was most helpful locating new cam followers for me at an excellent price and other bearings, bolts and such for the engine assembly.

While the engine was stripped for checking I decided to hydroblast the castings to remove 30 years of built-up grime. Not overly blasted to look new, but still a good match for the gearbox casing, nothing looks out of place.

The engine fired up first kick as seen in the video and is waiting for an opportunity to visit a circuit for a test run. This is likely to be the Broadford Bonanza in 2022 (Easter) where we hope to run P1 and P2 together with someone more competent than me operating a video camera. Watch the Website and Facebook for the action.

While waiting for parts we decided to repair the belly-pan which was just about to fall to pieces. This developed into a full fairing repair and removing of the plastic type of paint it was coated in. Many thanks to Laurie Graystone who sat with me for hours rubbing it back, thanks again Lozza. Thanks also to Paul Taylor for cutting all the stickers for the Magni. Finally, Bernt Raulin, spray painting instructor at Chisholm Institute matched the original colour from photos provided. (Looks too good for a race bike!)

It’s worth noting however that the machine hasn’t been restored as such but simply freshened up to repair years of hard riding. The true essence and spirit of the bike remains, hopefully for many years to come…

First Fire-Up After Engine Rebuild

Watch out for a special cameo appearance by my better half, Sheree, who has been a key stakeholder in all my efforts. Love and appreciation to you !