In the 90s, Ducati captured the imagination of race fans and road riders alike with their exotic, race-winning v-twins, and the Japanese were forced to play catch up on track in in the showrooms, as they’d largely been relying on highly-developed, but less emotional inline fours in World Superbike and endurance racing. The rules of…
Different motorcycle manufacturers have different ways of mining riders’ nostalgia and their own history: Triumph makes motorcycles that look like they rolled straight out of the 1960s but perform like modern machines, while Harley Davidson makes actual 1960s motorcycles, only heavier and with 1980s brakes and electronics. Ducati’s retro bikes manage to straddle the…
Suzuki has a long-standing relationship with the smaller Italian brands, providing their well-engineered powerplants to the likes of Bimota, Cagiva, and Aprilia. It makes sense: big companies may have excess production capacity, and it’s practical for smaller companies to purchase powerful, reliable, thoroughly-developed engines and transmissions and instead focus on frames and styling. In the…
This is it. The end of the line. The last hurrah. The final countdown. The Ducati 900SS FE or “Final Edition.” Well, not really: 1999 saw the introduction of a brand new-ish, fuel-injected, Pierre Terblanche-styled SuperSport that carried over most of this bike’s strengths. But this is the very last of the old-school, carbureted SuperSports…
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…
The Ducati 916/748 was the poster child for performance motorcycles throughout its production, with the same sort of ubiquity the Lamborghini Countach enjoyed in its heyday. With so many of them made over such a long timeframe, it’s easy to forget how huge an impact the bike had when it was new: Tamburini’s creation may…
Erik Buell’s creations have almost always been over on the wild side, and this later 1200cc Westwind is no exception. Built in quite limited numbers, it had several innovations, and a big Harley twin which booked more ft.-lbs than hp. The Kansas example has low miles and appears un-fettered, should clean up nicely. 1990 Buell…