NCR
A Workshop on Via Signorini
Walk the western edge of Bologna today and there's little to mark the spot, but in 1967 a small mechanical workshop opened on Via Signorini that would quietly shape the fortunes of Ducati racing for the next three decades. Three men set it up: Rino Caracchi, Giorgio Nepoti, and a partner named Rizzi. They took the first letters of their surnames and called the place NCR. It wasn't a motorcycle manufacturer in any conventional sense — there was no showroom, no catalog, no ambition to sell bikes to the public. It was a tuning shop, built around the idea of taking Ducati's production singles and twins and finding the speed the factory didn't have time, or budget, or interest to chase itself.
That distinction matters, because it explains almost everything that follows. NCR never set out to be a motorcycle brand. It became one by accident, through two decades of being the sharpest tool in Ducati's racing shed.
Cutting Teeth on the Singles
The early years were about small bikes and small classes, but the results got noticed fast. Between 1967 and 1969, riders named Tarlazzi, Loigo, and Baroncini rode NCR-tuned Ducati 250s to the top of the Moto Sport class, and it was here that NCR's reputation as a house that could extract real performance from Ducati architecture first took hold. Not long after, the workshop turned its attention to Ducati's new twin-cylinder engines — the first V-twins from Borgo Panigale to pass through NCR's hands for serious modification.
Over the following decades, a small and remarkably stable group of craftsmen ran the technical side of the operation: Franco Farnè, along with Recchia, Pedretti, Cavazzi, and the great Ducati engineer Fabio Taglioni, whose fingerprints were on so much of what NCR built. This wasn't a factory with rotating staff and org charts. It was closer to a guild — a handful of men who understood Ducati engines at a level the factory's own production line rarely required, refining the same basic recipe race after race.
The Unofficial Factory Team
The arrangement that defined NCR's golden years came out of necessity as much as ambition. Through much of the 1970s, Ducati itself wasn't running an official racing program. Rather than walk away from competition entirely, the factory handed engines and chassis to NCR and let them do the work. In effect, NCR became Ducati's racing department without ever being on Ducati's payroll — the first outfit to carry the factory's colors into competition without carrying the factory's name.
It was an unusual setup, and it worked because both sides needed it. Ducati got a racing presence it could point to without diverting resources from road-bike production. NCR got a bottomless well of engineering problems to solve, and the freedom to solve them without a corporate bureaucracy looking over its shoulder. The bikes that came out of Via Signorini in this period weren't concept exercises — they were built to be raced hard, immediately, by people who needed to win.
Hailwood, the Isle of Man, and the 900NCR
The single result that cemented NCR's name in motorcycling history came in 1978, when Mike Hailwood returned to the Isle of Man TT after eleven years away from the mountain course and won the Formula 1 race on a Ducati prepared by NCR — the bike now known simply as the 900NCR. It remains one of the most celebrated comeback stories in the sport, and NCR's engineering was central to making it possible.
How many of these bikes actually existed is a question that doesn't have a clean answer, and there is conflicting information about it even among people close to the story. Rino Caracchi himself is cited as putting the number at 18 complete machines with 20 spare engines built at the time. Other sources tell a different story — auction house Bonhams has cited a range closer to 20 to 25 roundcase machines, while at least one account puts the true race-spec total at just three bikes. The truth is likely tangled up in the difference between what was built for racing, what was assembled from spares afterward, and what later carried the 900NCR name without being part of the original run. Sources disagree, and anyone chasing an exact production figure should treat any single number with caution.
Less mythologized but just as telling was NCR's connection to Cook Neilson's 1977 Daytona win. Neilson and fellow Cycle magazine editor Phil Schilling took a Ducati 750 SS to victory in just the second season of AMA Superbike racing, on a bike that became known as Old Blue. NCR's link to that story came later, when the company built a tribute machine decades on — but the original Daytona win itself stands as one of the clearest proofs that Ducati's twins, sharpened by the right hands, could beat anything American or Japanese put on the grid.
Beyond Hailwood and Neilson, other riders are said to have passed through NCR's orbit over the years. Names like Cannellas, Grau, Perugini, Francini, and Ricci come up in accounts of the era, and riders such as Gardner and Spencer are associated with Ducati-NCR machinery running under other teams' banners, though these details come from enthusiast and forum sources rather than independently verified records. The exact roles and even first names attached to some of these figures are thinner in the record than the Hailwood story, and worth taking as part of the broader picture rather than settled fact.
Quiet Years, Then a New Chapter
By the early 1990s, the racing-workshop model that had sustained NCR for a quarter century was running out of road. Ducati's own competition efforts had grown far more sophisticated, and the informal arrangement that once made NCR indispensable had less reason to exist. The marque didn't vanish, but it drifted, its name kept alive more by reputation than by output.
The turning point came in 2001, when Poggipolini S.r.l., an Italian precision-engineering firm with deep roots in motorsport and aerospace component manufacturing, acquired the NCR brand and established the NCR Factory. Stefano Poggipolini's aim was specific: build an extremely light motorcycle using materials more at home in Formula 1 than in a motorcycle showroom, wrapped around a two-valve Ducati engine. It was, in a sense, a return to first principles — take a Ducati powerplant and build something around it that the factory itself never could.
Under Poggipolini, NCR stopped being a tuning shop and became something closer to a boutique manufacturer, though the numbers stayed tiny. More than 150 NCR motorcycles were built by hand at the San Lazzaro di Savena factory, each one effectively tailor-made for its buyer. In 2002 came the 100ONE, one of the new era's most significant releases. In 2003, NCR showed the Macchia Nera at EICMA in Milan — a naked machine built around the Superbike 998RS engine, weighing just 135 kilograms and producing 185 horsepower, numbers that would have been unthinkable for a road-legal machine a decade earlier.
Two years later came the Millona, notable as the first motorcycle entirely designed, developed, and built in-house by NCR rather than derived from an existing Ducati platform — a genuine break from the marque's original identity as a tuner. In 2007, NCR released the New Blue, a limited-edition machine paying tribute to Neilson's 1977 Daytona win, having been presented to the public the previous year at the Milan show. Joe Ippoliti became associated with NCR at some point in this period, serving as the company's voice on projects such as the M16 that followed, though the exact date he joined is not firmly documented in available sources.
The clearest statement of what the Poggipolini-era NCR had become arrived in 2010 with the M16, a motorcycle built around carbon fiber componentry with a singular goal: be the lightest machine on the road without giving up performance. It was less a callback to the TT1 racers of the 1970s than a demonstration of what precision manufacturing could do when cost was no object and the customer base numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands.
NCR Today
NCR still exists under Poggipolini Group ownership, operating less like a motorcycle company in the traditional sense and more like a workshop for people who already own several Ducatis and want something no one else has. The bikes it produces now sit among the most expensive production motorcycles in the world, with figures north of 160,000 US dollars for the most extreme builds — machines that can weigh under 330 pounds and produce 200 horsepower, numbers that would embarrass a good deal of contemporary MotoGP machinery.
What's remarkable, looking back over more than fifty years, is how consistent the underlying idea has stayed even as the business around it changed completely. NCR began as three men in a Bologna workshop finding speed that the Ducati factory didn't have time to find itself. It nearly disappeared once that role stopped being necessary. And it survived by becoming something new — a maker of hand-built, Ducati-rooted machines for a clientele that wants exclusivity as much as performance. The name on the tank has stayed the same since 1967. What it's attached to has quietly changed several times over, and the thread connecting Hailwood's TT-winning 900NCR to a modern carbon-and-titanium M16 is thinner than the marketing suggests, but it's there — a small Italian shop that has spent its whole existence trying to make Ducatis better than Ducati could.