One Sunday last September, on a tricky, rain-slicked racetrack in Japan, a 22-year-old Australian motorcycle racer named Casey Stoner clinched the MotoGP World Championship for Ducati. Stoner’s triumph marked the first grand prix win for a non-Japanese manufacturer in more than 30 years; that Ducati won on the home track of Honda, the world’s top-selling motorcycle brand, made the victory even sweeter for the Italian boutique firm.

In the winners’ group photo, Stoner poses beside his bike, No. 27—a number someone had modified with two small white zeroes to read 2007. It was a subtle but highly symbolic customizing job. “The last few years have been a tough time,” Claudio Domenicali, director of Ducati’s product and racing departments, had said the previous January. “Our year will be 2007.” He turned out to be right: Ducati rolled out several motorcycles in 2007 that had buyers raving for the first time in years. It replaced its unloved 999 Superbike with the sleek 1098 and introduced two popular models: the Hypermotard and a new version of its venerable Monster. In a final flexing of its stylistic and marketing muscle, the brand began production in November on the Desmosedici, a 16-valve, V-4 version of its grand prix racer, limited to a run of 1,500 bikes. Even with an eye-popping $72,500 sticker price, there’s no shortage of buyers.

This anno spettacoloso marked a reversal of misfortune for a company that aficionados once revered as the builder of the world’s most beautiful bikes. At its height, Ducati represented a blend of panache and performance. In 1998, its kinetic two-wheeled sculptures took pride of place in "The Art of the Motorcycle" exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The show broke museum attendance records, even as the Bologna-based manufacturer was losing its top-tier status as the creator of dream machines that everyone wanted but few could afford. Increasingly stylish and technologically advanced bikes from Italy, Japan, and Germany were chipping away at Ducati’s sales and celebrated reputation, and management miscues were sending the company into a long, slow skid.

This wasn’t the first time the firm had run into trouble. One of Italy’s largest motorcycle makers, Cagiva, bought Ducati in 1985 and is said to have siphoned off its resources and profits to shore up Cagiva’s weaker brands, until, a decade later, the factory was producing only about 30 Ducatis a day. Spare parts were scarce, and employees’ salaries went unpaid for months at a stretch.

In September 1996, the U.S.-based private equity firm Texas Pacific Group, partnering with an Italian unit of Deutsche Bank, bought 51 percent of Ducati for a price reported to be ­between $285 million and $325 million. T.P.G. has owned companies as diverse as Burger King, Bally, and Neiman Marcus, and although Ducati didn’t fit the profile of other brands in T.P.G.’s portfolio, investors viewed it as a prestigious property that could easily be turned around. But T.P.G. soon discovered it was in over its head.