The Glidd of Glood Blog

Ducati Diavel – a tassel-free motorcycle

Tee hee.

Tee hee hee hee. 

That is the sound of Ducati fans the world over, sniggering as they heard the news that Ducati was going to produce a cruiser bike. It’s a segment dominated by Harley-Davidson and is synonymous with beards, tattoos, cut-off jackets and dodgy jewellery. Bike owners in this market seem to be bad-ass bros or more likely, dentists and bank managers in a mid-life crisis – or so the prevailing wisdom has it. Is there anything more risible about these bike aficionados than about those who choose to dress up in full racetrack regalia everyt ime they take to the roads, or the supercross clones? Probably not. Everyone lives their passion the way they want to, and dressing up and assuming a different persona at the weekend is a pretty harmless occupation that brightens up the lives of hard-working people.

But for some Ducati fans, the Diavel is a line-extension too far, one that wipes its dirty tyres on the Ducati brand image, sullying it. Ducati has managed to expand out of the sportsbike niche into urban chic (Monster), adventure sports (Multistrada), supermotard (Hypermotard), so why not inhabit the cruiser niche too?

Well today, I got to have a little scoot on a Diavel when I took my 999 for its service and I can tell you that you can stop sniggering right now. If you want to continue to laugh at it, you’d better be quite handy on a bike yourself, because the Diavel is quite capable of blowing you into the weeds.

I won’t bother to comment too much on the look of the thing, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder and you can pretty much judge for yourself. It looks brilliant from some angles, a lot less brilliant from others, as far as I am concerned. I also think it is overly black. Admittedly, the one I tried was the carbon one, but that is an awful lot of black. This might sound rich coming from someone who owns the 999 in black and is on a quest to make it blacker, but the Diavel is a heavy-looking bike and all the black makes it look like an anvil. Sure it looks pretty mean, but it doesn’t look that flash. I’d have thought that looking flash is part of what this bike is about. It does have very futuristic lines. In fact, it looks exactly like the design mock-ups that appeared in bike mags over ten years ago of what we would all be riding in the 21^st century. I can’t say that I fell in lust with it, but it has its moments.

Still, more to the point, what is it like to ride? In a word, fun.

What you need to bear in mind is that Ducati is a company that knows how to make fine motorcycle engines, excellent chassis and deliver great brakes and road-holding. It’s not the moment that they enter a new market segment that they develop collective amnesia.

It feels a little Monsterish but more so. For a start, it is not a heavy bike, no matter what it looks like. What’s it meant to weigh? About 210kg? That isn’t much and for a muscle bike, it’s absolutely nothing. It feels very light and manoeuvrable, and puts you immediately at ease. This is not a bike where you have to continually worry about how to deal with its bulk. There isn’t much. The handlebars are pretty wide, which I found a little disconcerting to begin with, but frankly, they only felt slightly strange on first gear hairpin corners where you have to consciously tip the bike over. The rest of the time, the riding position feels very comfortable, remarkably so for an unfaired bike. Sure, on the motorway and wound up to about 115 mph (ahem…) your helmet gets a little pressed on to your face, but you could cruise happily at over 90mph without feeling any real fatigue. When I tried this stunt on the Hypermotard (admittedly not really designed for motorway cruising) my head was shaking all over the shop and I was hanging on for grim life in the wind-blast. Even the Multistrada produces a fair about of helmet buffeting at speed which I found uncomfortable. But the Diavel is fine here and amazingly, you feel no need to tense up your arms or shoulders to counteract air-resistance. The seat is also massively comfy, and the riding position doesn’t hurt your lower back either. OK, I wasn’t on it all day, but I am pretty sure that Ducati have the ergonomics sorted.

There aren’t any ground clearance problems, despite the low-slung nature of the beast. Sure, I bet you could ground the pegs, but you are going to have to be getting quite a shift on to do so. It’s not cruiseresq in this area. And the pegs aren’t ludicrously far forward either. Getting off a supersports Ducati, it took me no time to adapt to the riding position.

The motor, like the one in the Multistrada or Streetfighter, is superb. It feels a lot more like the Multistrada than the Streetfighter (haven’t ridden a 1098 or 1198 so I can’t compare it to those bikes). In the Streetfigher, it feels rabid. In the Diavel, it is just massively powerful, but perfectly docile whichever of the modes (there are three, Urban, Sport and Touring) you choose. It will happily trundle around at 30 miles an hour in built-up areas or on some of the lunar-surfaced mountain roads I rode it on. At least, it trundles as happily as you can expect for a 1200 cc twin. But supposing you have just been on a heist and need to make a quick getaway on it, all you have to do is twist the throttle in earnest and it takes off like greased weasel poop. This is exactly what you want. You can either pootle about and admire the scenery and avoid frightening the girlfriend or you can get a move on and indulge your sportsbike fantasies. The Diavel is perfectly happy doing both. 

What of the handling? Here again, we are in familiar Ducati territory and I felt immediately at home. Coming down a steep mountain road littered with hairpins, you can come steaming down and leave the braking late. There is no big mass transfer (as there isn’t that much mass), the chassis feels planted and the brakes are top-notch and confidence-inspiring. And on the way up the mountain, it is a hoot to shoot out of the hairpins at a rate of knots and hoon up to the next one before banging it down a couple of gears and tipping it in. I’m not sure that on a road like this I’d be a lot faster on the 999. If I was on a very fast road, following a river say, with good visibility, well-surfaced corners, then sure, I’d be happier on my bike, but for pointing and squirting, the Diavel is in its element. I enjoyed it more than the Multistrada for this, as you aren’t sitting way up and dropping in from a great height.

The instrumentation is typical modern Ducati. The LCD tacho is OK, although I prefer the big white analogue one on my 999. But the speed is indicated in very small figures, so that I had to hunt around the instruments to find it. You could just as easily be looking at the water temperature. There’s a nifty little colour screen down near the tank that tells you what mode you are in and a couple of other things. To be honest, I didn’t spend much time looking at it, as it isn’t really in your field of vision if you are trying to negotiate the road. It’s a bit of a pity that they didn’t make the main screen colour too. Instead it is the standard grey. The starting system is all very Multistrada too, with its keyless ignition. I can’t comment too much on the different riding modes as I didn’t have it in my possession long enough to test them properly, although I did briefly try all of them. I went up the mountain in Touring (so still had all 162 bhp), and came down it and tackled the motorway in Sport. I put it into Urban for a particularly nasty piece of cratered road into a village, but I was going so slowly here that the bike was at the lower end of where it felt comfortable.

So, verdict? Simple. I didn’t want to give it back. If I had the cash, I’d add one of these to the garage. It is a real-world bike which is hugely pleasurable to ride and very capable. The only real downside is that I don’t know where you are going to put the luggage if you want to go away for a weekend à deux. You’d probably have to have a Leaning Tower of Pisa tank bag in which case you can forget being able to see any of the instrumentation, or you’d have to load the girlfriend up like a donkey with an outsized rucksack. Can see that going down like a lead balloon. Irritating, as this is a bike that you desperately want to take immediately to the Côte d’Azur, if you live here, some 500 kms away. You’d have a blast on the nadgery back roads in the arrière pays, or opening it up on the motorway, and then looking cool in Nice or Cannes as you park it outside a chic café.

 

I am pretty sure that shortly, the only people grinning at it are going to be the owners.

 

 

 

The Ducati Streetfighter – coming to a hedge near you

 

I have just been riding the new Ducati Streetfighter and sad to say, I think it is the most pointless motorcycle I have ridden in a long time. Don’t misunderstand me. I love Ducatis. I have been riding them for 24 years and in that time I have had 8. I have also ridden a few others I have never owned. So we can’t forget the pro-Japanese bias.

 

Picking up my 999 from a service today, my friendly dealer suggested I might like to go for a scoot on his demonstrator Streetfighter – just for the hell of it. Hard to refuse really.  The thing had just come off the track so had no mirrors, but apart from that, was bog-standard; somewhere in the region of £11k’s worth of motorcycle.

 

The first thing you notice is the riding position. This seems pretty natural, and I can’t say that I noticed the supposed problem with the right-hand footrest being weirdly positioned that Two Wheels Only indicated. The strange thing was that with my full-face Shark helmet on, I couldn’t actually see any of it at all when I was riding it. You have to lower your head to see the clocks, though this is no great loss. They are dull and digital and the tacho is hard to read, not that that makes a great deal of difference, as we shall see. But the feeling is of being on a giant scooter.

 

Ducatis always feel super stable. That is the Ducati feel. Even the Multistrada 620 I tried once, also lent by the garage, could be thrown into corners with abandon with that great “on rails” feeling that gives you supreme confidence. Not so the Streetfighter. You feel like you are sitting on the invisible front wheel, which makes for quick steering perhaps, but does nothing for giving you blind confidence in the handling, no matter how capable it really is. I also found my private parts squashed several times on the tank, which is more to do with the riding position than any strange physical attributes I may have. It feels very light, which is pleasant, but if it’s going to be at the expense of stability…

 

The motor is awesome, as in it truly inspires respect. Right from the off, it has an urgency about it that I can’t remember feeling on any other bike. My 999 is supposed to have about 145 bhp which I consider more than enough for road use. In fact, the only place it might make any sense is on the track. The Streetfighter, seemingly, has even more. What this bike does best is accelerate – increasing its rate of velocity is where it is happiest. That would be fine if it was happy doing other things, but it isn’t really. Forget trickling along behind slow moving traffic or in town. It hates it. The motor seems unhappy below 4’000 revs, or really at any constant speeds. Ducatis are never good in town, but this one makes the 999 seem highly flexible. Which it normally isn’t.

 

Once again, if the thing were docile, it wouldn’t really be a problem, but it is anything but docile. It feels like riding a barely broken horse. It’s got a mind of its own, so although I couldn’t see it when riding it, I could never forget it was there. It demands your constant attention. Some testers have mentioned the quite chilled out and natural riding position but this is irrelevant if you are never allowed to chill out. Forget looking at the scenery. It’s like taking a rabid pit-bull for a walk.

 

The suspension contributes to this feeling. Frankly, it’s not very good. Ducatis tend to be firmly sprung, but this one is like the aforementioned pit-bull on a pogo stick. It bounces about on road irregularities and then this is transmitted to your throttle hand which has the Streetfighter suddenly deciding that it wants to take off like a bat out of hell. Not great when you are just trying to negotiate a hairpin (which I frequently was).

 

So you have a very twitchy motorcycle on your hands, one which bounces about, feels somewhat nervous in corners, and seeks to scream off into the blue yonder at the slightest provocation. All this seems like a recipe for visiting hedges as far as I can see. The last time I rode what seemed to be hedge-bound motorcycle was when I rode a Honda Big One. That was a lot more docile, but a lot heavier and I would clearly have stacked it sooner or later if I had ever been foolish enough to own one. Well, I reckon with the Streetfighter it would only be a matter of time too.

 

I should mention the brakes, though. Absolutely amazing. Definitely the best brakes I have ever used. Hugely powerful but with astonishing feel, which is just as well as you will be doing a lot of heavy braking if you ever get one of these.

 

So then you have to consider what exactly it is for. You can’t commute on it; it is far too rabid and would bite you in the bum while you were still digesting your Cornflakes. You can’t tour on it, as there is nowhere much to put your luggage, a pillion would desert you at the first service station and you wouldn’t be left in peace to admire the scenery. If you wanted to go balls-out on the track, you’d be better off with an 1198 or something of that ilk with a riding position and a fairing to suit. So as far as I can see, the only point of having a ludicrously powerful, naked and barely controllable bike is to hoon around on for no particular reason at all. Fair enough, if all you want to do is see how fast you can lose your licence, but 11 grand is quite a lot to pay for the privilege. Also, this would tend to suggest that going bonkers and trying desperately to tame the thing was great fun, but I found that it was a novelty that wore off quite quickly. There is also a lot of choice in this department. After all, Ducati can already offer you various Monsters, which probably make more sense, or the Hypermotard, if you want something also ludicrously impractical, but even lighter.

 

I have been getting the impression for some time that motorcycles have evolved to a point where they might disappear up their own exhaust pipes. I can see that the 1198, 848 etc are even more beautiful than my 999, but I can’t think that they are better road-going bikes. What are they supposed to be giving me more of? Handling? I can’t even use what I have. Motor? Without behaving like a total moron with a death wish, I can’t begin the exploit the possibilities of the motor I have. So what use am I going to have for a massively powerful naked bike which feels untrustworthy in corners and has a mind of its own? If it looked stunningly beautiful, I might start to try to convince myself how useful it was, but it’s not really that gorgeous, is it?

 

Listening to MCN’s Michael Neeves (Video review) you would think that I am just some wimpish old git who should be only allowed on a Deauville. He will tell you you can commute on it, tour on it, do trackdays on it, and obviously go everywhere on the back wheel. But the thing is, I am not a massively skilled trackday fiend (just an average one) and professional motorcycle rider, and nor, probably are you. So who do you want to believe?

 

I was happy to get back on the 999, tip it into the corners leading downhill from the garage, feeling I could have gone far faster, and enjoying the way the suspension actually worked. Wouldn’t mind having those brakes though.

 

Riding the Bim

Manu lent me his Bimota DB1 today to go riding with him. How generous is that? For those who don't know, the Bimota DB1 was Bimota's first bike with a Ducati engine and it must have come out in about 1986 or so. So we are talking a 20 year old motorcycle. When you think how much development there has been in bikes over the past two decades, you would think that the DB1 would be well past its sell-by date.

Wrong.

Propulsed (just) by Ducati's 750cc air-cooled motor, it is fairly gutless, admittedly. You would need two of these engines to make the same amount of power as my Ducati 999. It can barely scrape 70 bhp, so rapid progress requires wringing its neck constantly if you are to hope to keep your modern-mounted mates in sight. But then there is the cornering, which on the Bimota is still a relevation. It's about as big as a 125 (and about as fast...) so you can throw it around to your heart's content and lean it over just as far as you dare. This will make your heart very content indeed.

The Bim still looks fabulous - surely one of the most beautiful motorcycles ever made. It would be quite in order to have one just as an ornament. This would mean that you wouldn't have to sit on it much - a bonus, as the seat is like sitting on a piece of masonry. Ducatis aren't exactly plush, but this is ridiculous.

Still, nothing can detract from the sheer pleasure of riding it. What a fantastic machine. It was even still fun - just about - riding in the pissing rain.

I have always wanted one and I still do. The next best thing is borrowing Manu's. Thanks mate.

Below the Ducati 999. Much younger, much faster, much more useful. But strangely, not much more fun.