Made for just two years between 2002 and 2003, the Ducati 620 Sport was intended as an affordable way into Ducati ownership for riders more interested in the Ducati brand than in actual speed. But Ducati being Ducati, they were unable to build a sporty bike that actually handled badly, and they managed to create…
The stories of our favorite motorcycle manufacturers are often littered with failures and bankruptcy. Some brands even saw multiple deaths, followed by zombie-like resurrections where the victim simply came back wrong, like Gage from Pet Sematary… Truly, “Sometimes dead is better…” Luckily, Italian purveyor of accessible exotics Ducati seems pretty stable these days, rumored purchase…
Pantah Week continues with this very rare, and very oddly-styled machine. When you say “Ducati” to pretty much anyone, it conjures up images of sleek, exotic, often uncomfortable machines designed to win at all costs on track and inflame the desires of motorcyclists all over the world. What you wouldn’t normally imagine is something like…
Until pretty recently, Ducati’s 750 F1 was the redheaded stepchild of the Ducati family: it wasn’t a bevel-drive and so wasn’t really considered worthy of being considered a “classic” Ducati, didn’t have the reliability [cough, cough] of the modern two-valve twin, or the performance credentials of the liquid-cooled four-valve superbikes. But values have been rising…
Ducati’s first motorcycle was the Cucciolo [or “puppy” in Italian], which was basically a simple engine strapped to a bicycle, an affordable tool to get the Italian population mobile and back to work after the end of World War II. Certainly a far cry from the frameless, race-inspired exotica they’re famous for today. This NCR…
By the late 1970s, it was pretty obvious that Ducati needed to update their line: performance wasn’t really all that much of a problem, but their famous L-twin was very expensive to manufacture. So when the time came… They simply tossed the whole thing out the window and started over, with a parallel-twin that used…
What looks good doesn’t always work well: some of the most beautiful cars ever built were created by eye, without the aid of modern aerodynamics. Sleek machines like the Jaguar E-Type and the Corvette Stingray may look impossibly fast, but often try to leave the road at elevated speeds… Racing machines on the other hand…
Although the mid-1980s 750 F1 may not have represented the very best from Ducati, the TT2 and later TT1 race bikes that inspired them certainly did. Lightweight, perfectly formed, and highly effective, they epitomize Ducati’s racing ethos of the period. The original TT2 displaced 587cc and used the belt-drive Pantah motor, with the later TT1…