Photo Moto Guzzi and magazine
About the outstanding traction qualities of a motorcycle engine, someone will blur out: “Tractor traction!”. And everyone understands that this is a type of hyperbole, since any motorcycle in terms of traction (not power - can you tell?), Even far from the most frail tractor. And anyway, what a wise guy would take a tractor to turn into a motorcycle? There were none and there were none!
But no, it was. To understand the nature of this phenomenal exception, you have to dive half a century ago.
It somehow happened that the Italian military turned to Moto Guzzi with a request to make a tractor for them. You say: after all, kirzachi - the request is not addressed to: a motorcycle company, and where does the tractor? Do not rush to call the warrior dumb-headed: the machine was required not quite ordinary, and they put their eyes on Moto Guzzi, since the company is not simple either.
Moto Guzzi received a substantial share of the profit from the sale of the so-called motocarro - three-wheeled motogruzovichki. And not like the usual cargo scooters, but more impressive - with 500 cc engines and a load capacity of as much as one and a half tons. So the military and needed a light three-wheeled tractor - to carry the bazookas of the paratroopers and for all sorts of other unfocused affairs. They asked designers to take into account two requirements: the car should be four-wheel drive, and the engine more powerful than the 1-cylinder "five-hundred" on which the Moto Guzzi engine range was then supported.
Giulio Carcano, the former head of the just-disbanded racing department, took over the design of the 3-wheeled cuttlefish (whose athletes took eight world champion titles in road racing in nine years, but the bosses decided that all the cream had been removed and left the “ring” "). The engineers who created the lightest and most dynamic 350 cc “single-barrel” and the legendary 8-cylinder “five hundred” did not blunder again. How they coped with all-wheel drive there - this is for us to consider the lack of time. Another thing is interesting: for this car, Carcano designed with a needle a new engine - a 2-cylinder, V-shaped, 700-cc, with a rod-driven actuator for the upper valves.
