my name is mwd

Ducati’s next generation superbike has been unveiled – the 1098 (there’s an embarrasingly bad flash page here – I feel it’s the kind of thing that people would have produced in the 80s had flash been available then – but it does have more pics). The Ducati 916 derived range, which ran from 1993 till 2002 (included the 996 which my Dad has, and I had fun riding about on earlier this year) was considered something of a design classic in the motorbike world, and when they replaced it with the new look 999 people didn’t take to it the same way. Personally I quite like the modern look of the 999, but I can see it’s seen as less characterful. Anyway, the 1098 looks thus:

The 1098 is an attempt to both go back to the 916 design and take it into a modern age – the twin horizontal headlights and air intakes, the single side swing arm. The head of Ducati is quoted in MCN as saying he want’s to try and keep evolving the 916 look like Porsche do with the 911 – though I’m sure he’ll say whatever to get people that shunned the 999 back to buying Ducatis :) The swing arm look is quite nice – when seen from the right in some pictures the rear wheel just seems to be a stood on it’s own disconnected from the rest of the bike. Anyway, it looks not bad, though lacks the unusual, and therefore interesting, looks of the MotoGP derived Desmosedici. It’s also meant to be no slouch either, with an extra 100cc over the 999 and different cylinder shape to allow higher revs. Cunningly it has a magic valve on the exhaust to cut down noise at low revs, presumably due to new noise laws coming into the EU soon.

The 996 was a very fun bike to ride. I’d love to take it out again now that I’m getting more comfortable with bike riding. Of late things have been becoming a bit more second nature, and I’m getting more comfortable with leaning for cornering, which has been something I’ve not had much confidence with, but as I put on the miles I’m getting there. It’s easy to forget that although I’ve had my license for a year now, I’ve hardly ridden in that time, and am probably still under 2000 miles of experience post test.

Got a bit distracted there – the point was that the 996 was fun to ride – the power is truly unbelievable when you accelerate/brake on that thing, and I imagine the 1098 is a similar blast. I also imagine it’ll be equally as painful to spend an entire day on though :)

From a nerd perspective (it had to be there right?) I’m interested to note that the dash is an all LCD affair taken from the MotoGP and has a control on the handle bar to let you adjust the view, but more funkily it has a datalogging facility to allow you to record and track things. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in this kind of work, but it’s nice to see this data being made user accessible.

Anyway, I’m sorry to be a bit of a bike bore :) I’ll close with this semi-related vid clip – Fifth Gear race a Lamborghini Gallardo versus a Ducati 999 (a stock 999 at that – not the s (semi suped up version) or r (race replica) models).