WHAT THE 1299 PANIGALE R FINAL EDITION CELEBRATES
If you are talking about the end of an era, the 1299 Panigale R Final Edition really does mark the curtain being drawn on a remarkable run of not only race success but also showroom sales. So what exactly does it celebrate?
Although they enjoyed a fair chunk of race success before, it was in the World Superbike Championship that Ducati really made their name and that was down to the Desmoquattro motor, which first arrived in the Ducati 851 after a bit of development as a 748cc motor in a bike that raced at the Bol d’Or in September 1987.
Designed by Massimo Bordi (while he was at university in Bologna), the Desmoquattro was Ducati’s first four-valve head (hence the name) using the desmo system that also incorporated water-cooling. With the newly formed WSB series allowing 1000cc twins to compete against 750cc inline fours, the 851 was designed and built in less than two years and lined up for the first WSB round at Donington Park, which Marco Lucchinelli won after an aggregate result. This started Ducati’s domination of the series.
Although Ducati didn’t win the 1988 or 1989 WSB titles – they were taken by Honda rider Fred Merkel on the RC30 – when Raymond Roche won the 1990 championship the pattern was set and from 1990 until 2011 Ducati took 14 of the 22 riders’ titles and 17 constructors’ titles. But from 2011 things didn’t go so well as first Aprilia with the RSV4 and then Kawasaki with the ZX-10RR dominated, which leads us to the irony of the V-twin Panigale...
The 1199 Panigale R (remember that capacity limit, the R is 1198cc...) raced from the 2013 season until the end of the 2018 season when the Panigale V4 R replaced it and has the dubious honour of being the only V-twin Ducati sportsbike never to win a WSB title. Yep, 851, 888, 916, 996, 998, 999 and 1098 (using the all-new Testastretta Evoluzione motor), they have all tasted the championship winner’s champagne but the Panigale’s lips remained dry. So while the 1299 Panigale R Final Edition (which in itself is a bit odd as the R model is traditionally a homologation bike and its 1285cc capacity is too big to qualify for WSB) celebrates the fact that a V-twin built by Ducati has taken 341 WSB race wins (eight after the FE was launched), 14 riders’ titles and 17 constructors’ titles, it does so knowing that the Panigale V-twin is also the only one to have failed in its task. Maybe that’s because it is also the only Ducati V-twin since the 1979 Pantha that doesn’t use cam belts, instead switching to cam chains...