TRACK DAZE
Ducati Day with Elite SportbikeJim RichardsonPage 2
continued... Having ridden an actual Ducati only once, (a 1098 bought by an IT manager acquaintance who purchased it as his first streetbike because, well, he wanted to be cool, and he had more money than sense) we signed up for as many sessions as we could. Since the line was long and clamorous, we wound up with four. And while you might not think that 20 minutes of riding is much time in the saddle to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a given machine, it’s amazing what you can learn when those 20 minutes are on the track, with no cops and no speed limits.
MONSTER 1100 Let’s get the admission of bias out of the way immediately: My everyday ride is a Triumph 1050 Speed Triple. It is the Monster’s sworn enemy, a scrappy, bare-knuckled little English streetfighter which is hardly more than a whopping  great three-cylinder lump of horsepower hung between two wheels. Nothing on it is pretty. Everything on it is functional. It is, to my thinking, the purest expression of essential motorcycle riding bliss ever created. Monster owners tend to disagree. Vehemently. While I’d never actually ridden a Monster, I’d always secretly worried that perhaps the Ducatisti were right. Perhaps with their Desmodromics and their Marchesinis and their other barely pronounceable bits of high-priced kit, the Monsters were actually superior creatures. Then I rode one. On a race track. And it was not particularly pleasant. To begin with, the seating position is all wrong; more upright than even the stock Speed Triple, with your arms splayed out to reach the controls on the enormous 10-foot-wide dirtbike handlebars and your feet jacked up awkwardly. What’s worse, you’re stuck there, perched on a seat configured in such a way that, in combination with the bars and pegs, it’s very difficult to move around on the bike in the corners. And the engine? I thought V-twins were supposed to be torquey beasts that will rip your arms, Wookie-like, from their sockets but this was more like an Ewok tugging your pant leg to be let out for poddy. Sure, there was some power at the very upper end of the tach but just when it starts to be fun, you hit the rev limiter and have to start all over again. There are 600s with broader powerbands.
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