In a much-visited marquee displaying a historical exhibition illustrating Ducati’s finest hours in competition, TUDOR found the ideal setting in which to present its Heritage collection and its latest Grantour and Fastrider sports chronographs. These two collections are the ones the brand associates with the world of Ducati – Grantour being linked to the powerful 1199 Panigale, while Fastrider offers models with ties to the Monster. Sporting a dial in red and black (the colours of both TUDOR and Ducati),  one of the Fastrider chronographs in particular celebrates the partnership begun in June 2011. For motor sports enthusiasts World Ducati Week 2012 was also an opportunity – above the unmistakable roaring of this particular Italian brand of engine – to realize that TUDOR and Ducati share many points in common. Both firms were founded in 1926, while in 1946 Ducati launched the production of its first engine and, that same year too, TUDOR became a limited company, in a prelude to the successful launching of the TUDOR Oyster model. Nearer our times, in 2007 – the year TUDOR was negotiating the turn that was to lead the brand to its present visibility – Ducati won its first MotoGP World Championship.

 

This synchronicity between the two companies lends added weight to the legitimacy of the partnership between one of the great names in Swiss watchmaking and one of the icons of Italian motorcycle racing – a shared outlook that was very clear to Paul Smart, the legendary 1970s Ducati rider who would not miss the Misano event for the world. As a friend of the watchmaking brand, Paul Smart spoke with his well-known passion with TUDOR’s guests – retailers and journalists who were fascinated to hear, many for the first time, about the British rider’s adventures and the arcane lore of motorcycle racing back in the days when the sport still involved competitions between enthusiastic amateurs. Paul, who had the distinction of winning the first Imola 200 Miles in 1972, was presented with a TUDOR Heritage Chrono mechanical chronograph.

 

In another high point of the gathering, the “Ducati University” gave an opportunity for many talks, one of them on managing the Ducati Corse team which races in the MotoGP World Championship, given by its two star riders, Valentino Rossi and Nick Hayden. Another Ducatista awarded the honours of the podium was the Indian Sundeep Gajjar, who had just finished his 25-day, 9,750-km journey from Dubai to Misano behind the handlebars of his Ducati Multistrada, wearing a TUDOR Fastrider chronograph on his wrist. The journey and the pictures from Sundeep Gajjar’s “motographer” feature in the Passion Motorsport section on the www.tudorwatch.com website. 

 

The culmination of World Ducati Week 2012 – a whirl of demonstrations, stunts, parades and rock concerts in an atmosphere of festivity and conviviality – was the Diavel Drag Race by TUDOR which pitted eight famous riders against one another in a competition that gave the thousands of spectators, squeezed into the stands for the Misano World Circuit, some powerful adrenaline kicks. In this 500-metre drag race, the Italian Valentino Rossi – a living legend if ever there was one, and venerated above all others in this Ducati temple – was beaten by 0.023 of a second by the Australian Troy Bayliss, an idol for Ducatisti and three-times Superbike world champion, who won the TUDOR Fastrider mechanical chronograph awarded to the winner. Taking third and fourth places, the American Nicky Hayden (another Ducati rider in MotoGP) came in ahead of the Spanish Carlos Checa, 2011 Superbike world champion.

 

By the end of these four days of red-and-black motorcycle passion, TUDOR had confirmed more strongly than ever its position as a standard-setting watch brand for sports. With their classy style and powerful design, amid the decibels and the visual treats, TUDOR watches won the hearts of a young, enthusiastic audience by demonstrating their close links with the Multistrada, Monster and other Diavels that people the world of Ducati. In the fervour of the Misano melting-pot, the Genevan brand found aficionados with a temperament to match its own.