Desmorelda, the Ducati Pantah I bought new in 1985 & ran for 3 years as my principal form of transport was 100% reliable. I sold it with nearly 50 000km on the clock for £ 250 more than I paid for it new, but then in those days they were as rare as hen's teeth. Sigh. I loved that bike. If I can persuade my scanner to cooperate I might even post a picture of it. I once arrived at a dinner party on it where one of the other guests was the boss at the time of Maranello Concessionaires. In front of the assembled company he announced that in his opinion the Ducati engine was one of the only ones as elegantly engineered as a ferrari one.
The Mercedes W196 and the SLR 300 both had desmo engines, 'tho the first desmos were developed before the 1st World war on a GP Delage if memory serves me right. For sure, as the man who put them into production on Ducatis Dr Fabio Taglioni deserves most of the plaudits. It has to be said 'tho that the undoubted engineering excellence that went into the Ducati desmos was overtaken some time ago by the improvements in metallurgy of valve springs preventing bounce at high revs without needing the complexity of the desmo actuation.
