APRILIA DORSODURO 900
Now the Dorsoduro 900 wouldn’t be my first choice for an out-and-out supermoto bike. If we were going to be heading to a full-on supermoto track, complete with off-road section, massive jumps and hordes of screaming fans, I think I would have gone for something a bit little more motocross-y. But I knew this test was going to involve as much road riding as it would track stuff, so I opted to bring a slightly more sensible steed to the party. Yes, at £8,999 it’s a few hundered quid more than the Husky, but its two grand less than the Ducati and it’s reasonably quick, reasonably comfy and with its reasonable amount of tech I reckoned the Dorsoduro was going to be the mummy bear of this test; and if mummy bear's porridge was ‘just right’ for Goldilocks, the Dorso’ ought to be good enough for little old me.
I’ll grant you, it’s not the most stylish thing to grace the pages of FB mag with its plasticy looking trims and its extra-wide arse, but the trick dash and side-mounted swinging arm went some way, at least, to give it an air of superiority over the Husky.
The switches don’t feel that premium either, with a big clicky button on/off switch, the type of thing that you might expect to find on a kiddies’ tape recorder. But it all works, so I can’t be too critical of that.
The motor didn’t sound anywhere near as aggressive as the Duke or Husky lumps, and it gave the Dorso’ a really friendly, road bike feel. And so too did the suspension, which was lovely and soft. I’ll admit that when I first sat on the Aprilia, I thought the thing would be way too under-damped, but it didn’t take many road miles to realise that there was some method in the madness – it would effortlessly glide over all the bumps and potholes that I could throw at it. In fact, I even found myself seeking out sunken manhole covers and bumps in the road to ride over, just to marvel at the way the
suspension would soak up everything in its path. It was a very road orientated set up.
The modes are pretty easy to switch between and you can alter which information the dash tells you, which is nice, and traction control and ABS can both be turned off, which is really nice. It would have been even nicer to have a ’shifter and ’blipper though, rather than neither – but I guess that’s one of the reasons it’s £2k cheaper than the Ducati.
I genuinely think my bike was the most practical for the road, but as I suspected it was defiantly the mummy bear of the test. Any complaints I had with the bike were superficial, or minor – like the squidgyfeeling steering lock (I kept thinking there was a cable caught trapped somewhere when on full lock, but it has soft lockstops), or the slippery rubber blobs in the footpegs, which were great in the dry, but horrible in the wet. Likewise, my praise for the bike was hardly memorable – it’s comfy, the dash looks good and the brake callipers say ‘Aprilia’ on them, which was nice. It’s a very acceptable motorbike, at a reasonable price, but I didn’t even start to get an erection the whole time I rode it. Maybe my willy’s dead… or maybe I just think Aprilia can do better. Either way the Dorsoduro did what I needed it to, but not what I wanted it to.