SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
Lots of famous makes have skeletons in the cupboard, models they’d rather you didn’t know they ever made. Like the 50cc moped and 98cc scooters that MV Agusta produced back in the 1950s, or Moto Guzzi’s three-wheeled delivery truck – or indeed the smallest Norton ever sold, the overweight, unreliable Jubilee 250 twin, whose copious oil leaks stained many a British driveway. Or – but you get the picture. So how about the last-ever Ducati single-cylinder streetbike, of which 3846 examples were built from 1975 to 1979, which was also incidentally the first Ducati motorcycle to be built with a left-foot gearchange? It wasn’t just that it was the 125 Regolarità and its later Six Days variant represented the Bologna factory’s only serious attempt to target the off-road market, but it was that contradiction in terms – a Ducati two-stroke!
It’s true that, like the dozens of other Italian makes trying to carve a slice of the country’s huge appetite for affordable personal transportation in the 50s and 60s, Ducati had earlier made several eminently forgettable 50-100cc two-stroke models, from the Brio scooter to the Rolly moped, the Mountaineer high-handlebar commuter to the Brisk single-speed runaround, whose names alone defied all known truth-in-advertising regulation, yet which collectively represented the major part of Ducati production in the 1960s.
But by 1975 when the 125 Regolarità was launched, Ducati had moved on, and was now well established as
