‘Ultra lightness & purit y’
The naughties saw big changes in motorcycling, but still there was the Blade…
Back in 2003, a strange-looking bike slipped quietly away from the Ducati factory and into the night. Like a probe for a coming alien invasion, the Multistrada 1000DS was sent ahead to test our appetite for change and sitting upright on large motorcycles with plush, long-travel suspension. Fancy a bit of this, British sportsbike nuts? Turns out we did. Not many people bought Ducati’s first stab at an adventure bike, but our tastes were shifting, our eyes beginning to focus on fresh shapes and more distant horizons. There were growing numbers of BMW GS owners among Bike’s readership plus the odd KTM 950 Adventure and Triumph Tiger too. It was coming.
For now, though, the superbike was dominant and peaking – Yamaha’s R1 and Suzuki’s GSX-R1000 as refined as they were brutal, the Ducati 999 far better than we remember. There was the Honda SP-2 with its sprinkling of HRC stardust and the jewel-like CBR600RR, all mass-centralisation and the spit of Valentino Rossi’s RC-V. Above all, there was the CBR900RR, the Fireblade that went back to the original Blade values of ultra-lightness and handling purity (plus a useful space under the pillion seat for sandwiches).
The 954, as everyone called it, had only 132bhp to the GSX-R’S 149bhp, but who cared? Its weightless steering made you believe it could dance around everything on the road. My beautiful white one lived on the Nürburgring that summer and I’ve not experienced that feeling of utter infallibility since. ‘It’s the easiest sportsbike ever to ride fast,’ we said in Bike, and I still pine for the same easy speed again.
In July 2003 we put a 954 on of the cover of what would become Bike’s best-selling issue ever, describing it as, ‘the best road-going superbike’. Just six years later our most popular issue of 2009 featured not a Blade – or any sportsbike – but the new fly-by-wire Multistrada 1200, which we proclaimed as, ‘the most important Ducati since the 916’. Truly a decade of wonderful bikes and seismic change.
‘Truly a decade of wonderful bikes and seismic change’