History

The Ducati story begins not with motorcycles but with electronics. In 1926, Adriano Cavalieri Ducati and his brothers founded the Società Scientifica Radio Brevetti Ducati in Bologna to manufacture radio components, capacitors, and vacuum tubes. The company grew rapidly, and by the late 1930s had expanded into camera accessories and optical instruments. The Borgo Panigale plant was established before the war; it was bombed in 1944 and rebuilt immediately after.

The pivot to motorcycles came in 1946 with the Cucciolo — a 48cc auxiliary engine designed by Aldo Farinelli and licensed by Ducati for attachment to bicycle frames. Its success led directly to the first complete Ducati motorcycle in 1950. The engineer Fabio Taglioni, who joined in 1954, transformed the company's technical direction with the desmodromic valve actuation system (which eliminates valve float at high revs using mechanical closure rather than springs), first raced in 1956 and patented in a form that Ducati still uses on every engine it makes.

The sporting reputation consolidated through the 1970s and 1980s on the race track: Mike Hailwood's win at the Isle of Man TT in 1978 (racing a Ducati he hadn't ridden before), the World Superbike championship founded in 1988 in which Ducati immediately dominated, and Carl Fogarty's four world titles between 1994 and 1999. The 2007 MotoGP championship won by Casey Stoner on the Desmosedici remains the only time a non-Japanese motorcycle has won the premier class world title in the modern era.