Before Ducati became the racing powerhouse we know today, there was one man riding alone, lapping deserted racetracks to keep the project away from prying eyes. Vittoriano Guareschi, born in Parma in 1971, was the first test rider of the Desmosedici, the man who taught the Red Machine how to stand on its own two wheels long before Casey Stoner, and even before Loris Capirossi, could take it to victory.

The call came in 2002, when Ducati Corse decided to enter MotoGP. Guareschi wasn't just a rider: he understood motorcycles, knew how to gather and interpret feedback, and could communicate exactly the right sensations to the engineers. The GP2, the earliest prototype, was a raw, incredibly powerful but almost "devilish" machine. It could already reach 320 km/h, but nobody knew, for example, whether it would even run straight at that speed. It was up to "Vitto" to find out.

For almost a decade, Guareschi put Ducati's prototypes through their paces on the development circuits, particularly Mugello and Jerez. Those were the years when Vittoriano witnessed the astonishing arrival of electronics, tested an early forerunner of today's ride-height lowering device, and spent entire days in the saddle… inside a wind tunnel. When Capirossi won in Barcelona in 2003, during Ducati's debut MotoGP season, much of the credit behind that achievement quietly belonged to him as well.

Today, the Desmosedici is an entirely different machine. But Ducati's MotoGP story began right there, with a lone rider relentlessly clocking up laps aboard a motorcycle that was genuinely frightening, and one non-negotiable mission: to turn it into a winner.