TIMMY ON TRACK…

Oh the 1198’s definitely just made its way into my top five.

It’s been a while since I’ve felt so engaged with a bike while riding on the roads and from the minute I sat on it and fired the old girl into life, I knew I was in for a treat.

Rider position, ergonomics, grunt, dry clutch rattle… the list goes on and each and every thing added to the riding experience.

I know I’m here to talk to you about the on-track experience, but I can’t overlook the road aspect with this machine, I simply had too much fun! Banging it down the gears with a blip of the throttle, braking hard in a straight line and releasing the brake gently as I moved my arse across the seat, stuck my knee out and rolled into the corners before standing the bike up sharply and firing it out with the front wheel gliding never felt so good, and with this bike I felt totally connected to everything that was going on… it was as though the bike was talking to me.

The thought of taking it to ride around one of my favourite racing circuits filled me with excitement, but when we got there, it wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined it would be and it took a little getting into… after all, track riding is a mile different to riding on the road.

I’d been out on the MV the session before and I can’t lie, it made the Duke feel slow, really slow. Turns out the gearing was a fair bit out as far as track gearing goes and I had to use a gear less everywhere to make the old girl go; even at the hairpin in first gear it was almost too tall and lacked in mechanical engine braking. To start with I was rather underwhelmed following my road experience, but the thing is, these Ducatis need riding differently because they are so different, and the characteristics of a big twin versus an inline four are huge… there’s more torque and it doesn’t rev as high, so it never sounds as though its screaming fast.

Traction control was present on the 1198, albeit a very early and basic system, so we thought we’d stick it on level one and see how it felt. Within two laps I was back in the pits getting Johnny to take it off. At first, I thought it was bad fuelling causing the massive flat spot and maybe I hadn’t been able to notice out on the roads, but it turned out to be the TC causing a lag in the initial throttle pick up. It might have been an early system for the old Ducati, but on level one I really wasn’t expecting it to be so intrusive, so there’s no points for the tech from me. Once we’d turned the TC off again, it went back to being silky smoothy with a very controllable power delivery.

The chassis was noticeably different to the other two machines and is much slimmer between the legs which I found made the bike easier to climb over and use your body weight as a bigger input. The riding position is somewhere between the BMW and the MV; more biased to the nose of the bike if anything, with a little weight in the arms but it’s nowhere near as bad as the MV.

The front wheel feels much more underneath you with a narrower rake angle, which I would’ve thought made for a better turning machine, but I felt like I had to put a fair bit of effort in to steer the bike through the fast changes of direction.

The 1198S was the only bike on test without electronic suspension, which I prefer. The modern electronic suspension is much more reactive than the old school kits. The front forks felt very soft and needed some more support for the heavy braking, so we added some compression and a couple of turns of preloads and it definitely improved the stability, while the rear suspension felt spot-on from the get-go.

However, I did struggle with the back shifting into Park corner, while going from fifth into second gear and letting the clutch out for each individual gear, it was as though nothing happened, and I’d selected neutral – which is a scary sensation at 160mph. It finally engages the gear on the slipper clutch, and it comes in quite strong so it’s not predictable at all. It seemed like a slipper clutch issue to me and filled me with no confidence to attack a corner. Similar to the MV, I had to space the gears apart and make sure each gear engaged before going for the next one, which slowed the lap time considerably.

Once I finally got my head around it and started to understand how I needed to ride the bike to get the most from it, I really started to have a lot of fun on the Ducati. I found it way more endearing and exciting to ride than the others, albeit maybe a little harder to get the same results on track, but it’s full of character and even though it’s not perfect, it never failed to put a smile on my face. It’s a real rider’s bike.