Ducati’s creation of the gorgeous, ground breaking 1199 Panigale three years ago turned out to be a job half done. In completely reinventing the traditional 25-year old architecture of its iconic 90-degree desmo V-twin otto valvole engine format—as part of its pursuit of producing the highest performance street legal Superbike yet available—Ducati to some extent threw the baby out with the bathwater.
For in creating the heavily oversquare 112 x 68 mm Superquadro ultra short-stroke engine (and endowing it with the largest diameter pistons to be found in the engine of any production car or motorcycle available today), Ducati certainly obtained the kind of outright performance that enabled the 1199 Panigale to more than keep pace with the ever more potent 1000cc fours that had threatened to usurp its status as the ultimate Superbike. But it did so at the expense of a quality long considered to be the key ingredient of any Ducati motorcycle—the muscular midrange torque that’s been the trademark feature of all desmo V-twins for the past four decades. It was traded away in return for greater top end power obtainable at the higher revs, which the Superquadro design is capable of reaching. As a result, a bike that was indeed super-effective on the racetrack in Superstock racing wasn’t as much fun to ride on the street. And even under race conditions it had to be ridden extremely hard using a lot of revs via constant use of the gearshift lever to keep abreast or even ahead of the one-liter fours. Not your typical Ducati, then.
But, never content with what was essentially a compromise, Ducati engineers kept working at delivering the best of both worlds, and when they invited me to ride the ultra-desirable ultra-lightweight limited edition 1199 Superleggera at Mugello last summer, I realized they’d succeeded in doing so. That über-version of the Panigale weighs a featherweight 342 pounds dry—thanks to a magnesium chassis and carbon fiber bodywork among much else—with a claimed 200 bhp/149 kw on tap at 11,500 rpm. The Superleggera had the missing midrange grunt restored to its Superquadro motor, allowing me to lap the Mugello GP circuit in a competitive lap time—for an Italian Superstock series grid—with just four gearchanges between the end of the pit straight and the start of it again. So, job done. Just transpose that to the stock Panigale, and you’re back in business… right, Ducati?
It turns out it wasn’t that easy, because the engineering solutions in the Superleggera didn’t all lend themselves to volume production. Some did, though, which is why the new 1299 Panigale unveiled at the EICMA Show last November (and now in production) incorporates at least some of them. But the ultimate solution to resolving the one disappointing element in the 1199 Panigale package, via the new bike, came from a step familiar to any performance engine tuner: just add cubes!
So on the 1299 Panigale Ducati engineers have increased the cubic capacity of the Superquadro engine from 1198cc to 1285cc via a 4mm overbore—employing even more massive pistons than before. This move has implicitly been made to address the problems that customers encountered riding the 1199 Panigale on the street or in track day use. (Since the new bike has no potential for competition use per se—the maximum twin-cylinder capacity is 1200cc for Superbike racing—Ducati has also produced a new 2015 version of the 1199 Panigale R to go Superbike racing with.)
Cubing up not only has resulted in a claimed 10 bhp increase in horsepower (to 205 bhp at the crankshaft at 10,500 rpm) and a key 10% increase in peak torque (to 144.6Nm at 8,750 rpm), but most crucially a 15% increase in torque in the 5,000-8,000 rpm midrange area, according to Ducati.
To read more of our 2015 Ducati Panigale 1299 S first ride in this week’s issue of Cycle News, click here
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