Claudio Castiglioni bought the dead MV Agusta name and revived it with the F4

MV Agusta had been Italy's premier motorcycle marque, taking 37 world titles and 270 Grand Prix victories between 1952 and 1976, but it closed its doors in 1977 and was placed into liquidation in 1982, the factory dismantled. Claudio Castiglioni's Cagiva — which already owned Ducati, Husqvarna and Moto Morini — first tried to buy the name in 1978, and finally acquired MV Agusta in the spring of 1992.

Rather than relaunch with a replica racer, Castiglioni commissioned his design chief Massimo Tamburini, fresh from the Ducati 916, to build an all-Italian 750cc superbike. Cagiva's Grand Prix budget was stretched thin, so Ferrari Engineering in Modena developed the prototype engine, with radial valves inspired by Ferrari Formula 1 practice; Tamburini stacked the twin headlights in the fairing's centre and shaped the four exhaust pipes, he said, to sound like organ pipes under Pavarotti.

The F4 750 Oro — carbon-fibre and magnesium, 126 horsepower, 184 kilograms — was unveiled at the Milan Show in September 1997, appeared in the Guggenheim's Art of the Motorcycle exhibition the next year, and entered limited production in mid-1999 at three bikes a day. All 300 Oro examples had been pre-ordered, buyers including King Juan Carlos of Spain and Jay Leno, and in 1999 the group restructured itself to make MV Agusta its main brand.

The 300-unit F4 750 Oro was fully pre-sold by the end of 1999, the group restructured itself around the MV Agusta name, and the brand still trades today

The marque's racing pedigree was intact even though the company was dead, so a single definitive machine could reconnect buyers to 270 Grand Prix wins.

Cagiva's resources were committed to Grand Prix racing, so a limited, pre-sold flagship financed the revival without betting the group on volume.

Tamburini's F4 aimed above the Japanese litrebikes on style and exclusivity rather than spec-sheet value, restoring the brand's old position at the top of the market.

The group already ran Ducati, so it had the engineering network, supplier base and credibility to build a four-cylinder flagship credibly.

A heritage name is only worth reviving if the first product is unmistakably the best in class: halo engineering funded the legend, and the volume bikes came later.

The F4 spawned the Brutale naked line and carried MV Agusta back into series production, though the finances stayed fragile: Castiglioni sold the brand to Harley-Davidson in 2008 and bought it back with his son Giovanni in 2010, and it has changed hands again since. The F4 750 Oro remains the most collectable of the modern MV Agustas — the bike that, as the press put it, heralded the marque's resurrection.