RideLust

Who among us wouldn’t want to wander the halls at Ducati’s Bologna, Italy offices? Imagine having a key card that would let you go wherever you wanted, so you could tour the factory’s museum and try each and every new Ducati on for size. Want to spin wrenches on some factory Moto GP bikes? Go right ahead, no one is watching you. The only thing cooler would be access to the key safes, so you could actually ride whatever new model you wanted to through the Italian countryside.

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A few months ago when I was at the LA Auto Show I got a chance to check out Ducati’s new Diavel motorcycle in person. First off let me just say that it is a sexy bitch, so sexy in fact that I am absolutely thinking about purchasing one. You see the Diavel is like the Italian version of Yamaha’s V-Max muscle bike, a machine that, for years went completely unchallenged in the segment. When the Diavel was first released it was clad in Ducati’s traditional red and black paint scheme, but now thanks to loads of consumer feedback Ducati has decided to hit us with what they call, “Diamond Black”.
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Back in the late 1980′s I was still a bit green behind the ears as it pertained to anything automotive. I knew I loved motorcycles, cars and anything mechanized, but up until that point I’d never had any real experience with any of them. Then I hit college and everything began to change. You see college, as everyone knows, is a time to get your vehicular groove on. You go out and buy a piece of shit car to get you from point A to point B and then sit back and thank the Gods of internal combustion that you actually have a way to get around. I however went the two-wheeled route as I was always infatuated with motorcycles. My first bike was a 1986 Kawasaki Ninja 250. It was a little pipsqueak of a bike, but it was great to learn on and it solidified the fact that up on two wheels was the right place for me to be. Unfortunately that bike met its demise when a buddy of mine stacked it into a water tower (no joke). He then paid me cash which paved the way for my first real motorcycle, a 1990 Ducati 750 sport.

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Rosie O’Donnell in a string bikini, hot sauce in coffee, liver flavored ice cream, $1,000 Ferraris and midget tranny porn. Along with the Ducati Monstrosity trike, these are all things I never need to experience. I don’t mean to take away from the mad engineering genius that TreMoto put into the Monstrosity, but some things are just flat out wrong, in addition to being hideously ugly.

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The debate over which is faster, motorcycles or cars has been going on forever. In a straight line there is usually no contest as the power to weight ratio of a motorcycle is simply to tough for an automobile to match. Handling however is another issue entirely, as this is where a great sports cars can usually come back to hold their own. You see a motorcycle has two contact patches that are generally about 3-inches wide, where a car has 4 extremely wide ones. Sure the bike is lighter and more nimble, but they’re generally tougher to run at speed and take much more concentration and skill to do so safely. The car on the other hand is more of a point and shoot machine, I mean sure there is a lot of skill involved but the odds of you falling off a car at 150 mph are generally pretty slim. The above video pits the 562 hp Ferrari 458 Italia against the 170 hp two-wheeled hammer that is the Ducati 1198S. Two Italian icons, one race track and only one winner. Click play to find out the results.

Source: Youtube.com

When one thinks of Ducati, the last thing they usually think about is heading off-road. I mean lets face it, Ducati’s are meant to be sliding around corners dragging foot pegs, not gallivanting along fire roads, beaches and dirt bike tracks. One dealership located down in New Zealand though has a bike on display that is like no Ducati I have ever seen. My initial reaction is that someone stacked a 2003 Ducati 999 and then decided to have a little fun with what they had leftover.
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Press photo via Hell For Leather

When Yamaha launched their original Vmax power cruiser back in 1985, it turned the motorcycle world upside down. Try though you might, you really couldn’t pigeonhole the V-Max into a single category: it would run with the fastest sportbikes of the day in a straight line, but couldn’t keep up in the twisties. It cornered far better than the cruisers of the day, and left them for dead in a straight line. It was all-day comfortable, with sensible ergonomics and an upright riding position. Throw on a windshield and some soft luggage, and it was a reasonable tourer (as long as you didn’t spend much time in V-Boost). Change out the exhaust, the shocks and rework the forks, and the bike was enough fun in the canyons to keep all but the most hardcore riders amused.

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Motorcycle engines come in a host of different configurations. There’s the V-twin, inline-4, parallel twin, V4, V6 and the triple and by some miracle of modern engineering they all seem to work well on a regular basis. The one that has eluded us though has been the much coveted V8. Sure, there have been those who have shoehorned a small block Chevy between the rails of a Harley, but for the most part the V8 motorcycle is something of a myth. Enter Dieter Hartmann-Wirthwein, the German man who has a flare for Italian motorcycles.
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Apparently the higher-ups at Ducati are trying to make sure they go to the right place when it finally comes time to meet their maker. You see they’ve just given Pope Benedict XVI twin Multistrada 1200S motorcycles to be used by His Holiness’s special police force, the Vatican gendarmerie. The bikes were even custom painted yellow and white which is apparently the papal paint scheme. For Ducati this was a momentous occasion and something that Ducati has taken much pride in.
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And yes, it very well could kick you into a bottomless well. The purpose-built Australian racer weighs just 661 pounds and is powered by a 170-horsepower 1200cc Ducati v-twin. It can hit 60 miles per hour in less than three seconds and can growl its way up to 173 miles per hour. It’s made of lots and lots of carbon fiber and the stuff of legend. Fittingly, only 300 will be made. The price for the “most superior fighting machine the world has ever seen?” $84,321. Youch.

Source: Autoblog, Spartan V