Rennie Scaysbrook | September 21, 2019
2019 marks a quarter-century since Ducati created the 916 superbike. This is more than a just a motorcycle—the 916 is the most important Ducati ever built
The powerhouse that is Ducati Motor Holding S.p.A, located in the industrial city of Bologna in the Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy, would not exist today without the creation of the 916.
Emanating from the design pen of the late, great, Massimo Tamburini, the 916 is the most important production motorcycle Ducati has ever created. It moved the brand from a relatively small, niche manufacturer of sporting V-twins, to one that created the most iconic sportbike ever seen before or since.
The 916 became more than just a motorcycle. Its beauty transcended cultures and became a style and fashion icon, loved for its swooping curves and inventive aesthetics as much for its on-track success.
That success was many and varied. Indeed, between 1994 and 1998, the machine badged the 916, took four WorldSBK titles (three to Briton Carl Fogarty and one to Australian Troy Corser), as well as countless race wins in European, American, and Australasian superbike competition.
Fogarty is considered the Godfather of the 916. Of the 55 WorldSBK races won by Ducati during the 916/996/998’s tenure, Fogarty captured 43 of them, making it the most successful machine and rider pairing in WorldSBK history.
This year marks the 25th anniversary since the 1994 Ducati 916 debuted on the world stage and promptly moved the superbike goal posts.
I want to acknowledge Cycle News contributor Jon Urry for his assistance in creating this article and Ian Falloon for his book, Ducati 916, that was used extensively for research purposes.
Photography by Ducati Archives
Before the Ducati 916
Before you begin to think about the 916, you need to go back to 1985 and the creation of the first four-valve Desmodromic V-twin, created by Massimo Bordi.
Ducati had just gone through a change of ownership from the state-subsidized VM Group control to become the property of Cagiva, located north of Varese and headed by Claudio Castiglioni and his brother Gianfranco.
Castiglioni inherited a company with a vast history of glorious two-valve, bevel-drive Desmo V-twins, the design of which was headed by the legendary Fabio Taglioni. Beautiful as they were, the bevel-drive twins were antiquated by the early 1980s, struggling to match the power output of the new breed of four-cylinder superbikes coming from Japan.
The growing popularity of 1980s superbike competition around the globe was something Castiglioni wanted a piece of and necessitated a new four-valve Ducati cylinder head design, beginning life as the OTV (Otto Valvole Desmo/Eight Valve Desmo) and later christened the Desmoquattro. Its creation was entrusted to a young Massimo Bordi based on his four-valve, air-cooled, bevel-drive thesis he completed 10 years prior at university.
Taglioni was none too impressed with the young upstart Bordi encroaching on what he felt was his Desmodromic design with Bordi’s four-valve pattern.
“He [Taglioni] was very negative, and I think he was jealous. But Claudio Castiglioni made the choice,” Bordi told Cycle News contributor Jon Urry. “Mr. Taglioni knew that the four-valve head was my thesis, my idea. He was jealous. He even made a drawing of a Desmo two-valve four-cylinder engine to fight with me. It was crazy; he was the one who invented the sports twin, and yet he was against me wanting to develop it.”
Building a four-cylinder motor would have been out of the question for Ducati at the time, and by April 1986, work hurriedly began on a four-valve cylinder head that made its racing debut five months later in a tubular steel trellis chassis penned and aesthetically styled by Massimo Tamburini at the Bol d’Or 24 Hour at Paul Ricard in France. It was ridden by riders Marco Lucchinelli, Juan Garriga, and Virginio Ferrari.
Using modified Pantah crankcases, the fuel-injected four-valve came in at 748cc but produced less than 100 horsepower, making it uncompetitive against the larger Japanese four-cylinder machines that dominated endurance racing. The machine failed to finish the Bol d’Or, retiring in the 15th hour with a broken con-rod bolt.
Despite the inauspicious debut, Bordi could see the potential of the new motor in that superbike rules in Europe and America allowed a 1000cc maximum displacement for V-twins, compared to the 750cc limit for fours.
The next time the four-valve machine was seen in public it sported a capacity of 851cc and had 115 horsepower on tap, with Marco Lucchinelli going on to claim one of the most significant wins in Ducati’s history at the 1987 Battle of the Twins event at Daytona. This win ensured the validity of Bordi’s design and the new path for Ducati V-twins.
“As the combustion chamber was much better on the 851 we increased the power to 115 horsepower and started doing very well in superbike racing,” said Bordi. “This was the turning point, I believe the needle on the test bench of the Ducati company had never ripped past the threshold of 100 horsepower before,” Bordi told 916 historian Ian Falloon.
The 851 would go on to claim the 1990 WorldSBK Championship in the hands of Frenchman Raymond Roche. Once capacity was increased further to 888cc, Ducati continued winning the championship in 1991 and 1992 with American Doug Polen. Scott Russell claimed the 1993 WorldSBK Championship on the Muzzy Kawasaki ZXR750 from Carl Fogarty on an 888. It was the 888’s swansong year, with the 1993 factory Ducatis sporting a capacity of 926cc.
Bordi’s four-valve design also ushered in a new era of production Ducati superbike specials. From 1987 to 1993, the 851 would spawn such legendary models like the Tricolor, 851 SP (Sport Production), 851 SP2, 851 SP3, and 851 SPS. With the renaming to 888, we got the 888 SP4, SPS, and rare SP5. There were also the genuine 851 and 888 Racing models created by Ducati, and over a five-year period, only 183 of these scarce machines were made solely for racing.
The final production 888 of 1993 was still heavily based off the original 851 that Lucchinelli rode to his Daytona success, and was by now outdated despite Fogarty finishing second in the WorldSBK Championship that season to Russell.
While the 851 and later the 888 were racking up race wins across the globe, in 1988, there was a new machine under secretive development in the Il Centro Ricerche Cagiva center in San Marino, headed by Massimo Tamburini.
Creating The Legend
Massimo Tamburini is a name well known to anyone with even a shred of motorcycle design history knowledge.
Dubbed “the Michelangelo of Motorcycles,” Tamburini was a founding member of Bimota with Valerio Bianchi (Bi) and Giuseppe Morri (Mo), with Tamburini (Ta) finishing the acronym. The Italian was the designer of not just the 851 and 888 but also the Ducati Paso, the stunning MV Agusta F4, Cagiva Mito, and Cagiva C588 and C589 500cc Grand Prix machines ridden by Randy Mamola, and was contracted to Cagiva at the time of their Ducati takeover in 1985.
That year, Tamburini was the lead designer of the Cagiva-owned Roberto Gallina Suzuki TGA1 500cc Grand Prix effort, which used an avant-garde, adjustable aluminum chassis design that was scrapped ahead of the 1986 season.
Even though the 851 had only reached production the year prior, in 1988, Tamburini was presented the brief by Castiglioni to create what would become the 916, incorporating Bordi’s new four-valve motor. It was to be a ground-up design, with the iconic styling integrated from the outset.
“I feel I am a motorcycle projector, not a designer, but with the 916, I ended up designing the bike as no one did it right!” the late Tamburini told Urry. “I decided not to follow the same route as the Japanese at the time. They had big motors and big bikes; I wanted a classical Italian bike—little, compact, easy to ride fast, and sexy. The 916 has the form of a lady when viewed from above—this is no coincidence—when you are sitting on a bike the best way to sit on it is like being on a woman.”
The motorcycle with the form of a woman would retain links to Ducati’s superbike past with the use of tubular steel for the frame, a material Tamburini was familiar with thanks to his chassis crafting days at Bimota. There had been the talk of using a twin-spar or even an aluminum frame, similar to what was used on the TGA1 Suzuki; however, consultation with engine designer Bordi, who wanted the tubular design to remain a Ducati trademark, saw Tamburini stick with tradition.
Indeed, tubular steel has proved the basis for every Ducati superbike chassis up to the Panigale of 2012, which debuted the first Ducati monocoque design for production motorcycles.
On top of its links to the past, the 916’s tubular steel chassis would be future-proofed from inception. Ducati wanted to ensure their new superbike was competitive well past the turn of the century and planned to gradually increase the motor’s capacity in much the same way they did with the 851/888 platform, so Tamburini designed a chassis that could easily fit a 1000cc engine, which the Ducati would reach at 996cc in its final year of 2002.
Tamburini’s 1994 916 chassis design was 20mm shorter in wheelbase than the 888 at 1410mm (55.5 in.) with a 49/51 percent front/rear weight bias, and one of its trademark design features was the single-sided swingarm.
Originally, Ducati had plans for the 916 to finally capture the Bol d’Or 24 Hour and Suzuka 8 Hours race wins, and thus a single-sided unit would prove better for fast wheel changes. Honda held the patent for single-sided swingarms with the ELF 500; thus, the Ducati design had to be sufficiently different to avoid encroaching on Honda’s property. The swingarm was made from cast aluminum, with the pushrod suspension linkage design with spherical bearings for the Showa shock created by a certain Claudio Domenicali, now CEO of Ducati.
Showa also provided the front suspension with fully adjustable, 43mm inverted forks, with brakes provided by Brembo in their “Gold Series” P4 four-piston calipers up front gripping dual 320mm discs and a single-piston caliper clamping on a 220mm disc at the rear.
The brakes were unimpressive by the standards set by the rest of the machine. The front discs were prone to warping, and the power provided by the 16mm PS master-cylinder and weak rubber hoses left a lot to be desired.
Brembo was also commissioned to make one of the defining features of the 916 in the gold-painted, hollow elliptical three-spoke wheels. Measuring 3.50 x 17-inches and 5.50 x 17-inches, the wheels were indeed a striking visual statement compared to the nondescript black three-spoke items gracing the base model 888—although the 888 SP5 came with five-spoke wheels.
Tamburini’s craftsmanship extended to the svelte brake and clutch levers, footpegs, handlebars, and taillight, but it was his sculpting of the bodywork and in particular, the headlights, that drew the world’s attention.
The man himself noted the design of the lights was the hardest part of the 916’s aesthetic, Tamburini wanting the lights to make as large an artistic impression as possible.
“If you see a bike such as a BMW coming towards you then you instantly know it is a BMW, I wanted recognizable lights, both front, and back,” Tamburini said. “It was such a struggle! I went to a company and asked them to design the lights, but they said it was impossible, I kept hammering on at them, and by the end, they were so sick of me they agreed to do it as long as I stopped bothering them.
“They thought the idea was ridiculous; they had these large lights and couldn’t understand why you would want small ones. But they were necessary for the design. I feel the 916 is prettier with its lights on than with a race fairing and no lights.”
Another visual trademark of the 916 is the massive 110mm twin under-seat exhaust mufflers. Tamburini freely admitted the Honda NR750 was the catalyst for the design after seeing the legendary Japanese machine at the 1992 EICMA Show in Milan. Up to that point, he’d been trying variations of side-mounted exhausts in the same guise as the 888, but the NR changed everything.
“When I saw the Honda NR750 in Milan in 1992 I thought it was going to be the future of motorcycling,” Tamburini said. He didn’t want to straight-up copy the NR but was happy to take the sharp lines of the Honda and craft them for the 916.
“I didn’t want the back end of the bike to look refined,” he said, “I wanted it to look aggressive but also classical. The two little exhaust ports exiting under the seat looked perfect. When I had done that, I stepped back and knew the 916 was finished.”
The design aesthetic may have been something we’d never seen before, but Bordi’s four-valve Desmodromic motor was not as innovative—only because it didn’t need to be. The big performance difference between the 851, 888 and 926cc motors was a 2mm increase in stroke to 66mm, with the 94mm pistons, mated to Pankl H-section con-rods similar to what was fitted in the 888 SP. That gave the motor a capacity of 916cc, although much of the motor owed its design to the 888 Strada, including 33mm inlet and 29mm exhaust valves, camshafts, the big-end journal, and piston gudgeon pin, gear ratios for the six-speed gearbox, and clutch.
Weber provided the fuel injection system, with the 50mm throttle body mated to an airbox fed by a ram air intake. Ducati claimed 114 horsepower at 9000 rpm for the 916. This wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire in terms of what could be on offer from Japan, but the quoted power was a sideshow attraction to the main event.
Unveiled at the 1993 EICMA Show in Milan, the 916 became a timeless motorcycling icon. Its beauty crossed social boundaries and moved the machine from motorcycle to rolling art, as evidenced by its leading feature at the Guggenheim Museum’s 1998 exhibition, Art of the Motorcycle.
The 916 influenced not just the future of Ducati design but the wider motorcycle industry. The flowing, curving lines signaled the beginning of the end of the boxy body shapes coming from Japan, with machines like the 1998 Yamaha YZF-R1 and 2000 Suzuki GSX-R1000 both taking design hues from the 916, albeit unintentionally.
The Ducati 916 is a motorcycle that still looks utterly stunning 25 years after it was first delivered to salivating customers, and is a testament to not just the forward-thinking philosophy of Claudio Castiglioni and Massino Bordi’s four-valve engine, but the sheer design wizardry of the late Massimo Tamburini.
Testing the 1998 Ducati 916 SP
We were lucky enough to be lent Dan Trotti’s 1998 916 SP for a quick ride in Southern California a few months ago.
This model is slightly different to the original in that it is a 996cc model (despite the 916 name) and meant primarily for racing, but some crafty work back in the day allowed for a title and for it to be registered on the street.
We hope you enjoy the video!
VIDEO | 1998 Ducati 916 SPS Road Test
Medium Rare: The Ducati 916 Senna
In March 1994, three-time World Formula One Champion Ayrton Senna visited the Ducati factory in Bologna and gave his permission for a limited run of 916 models to use his name. Less than two months later, Senna died after a crash at the nearby Imola circuit; a tragedy that also put the production of the model in jeopardy until Senna’s sister authorized the run to go ahead as a tribute to her late brother and with any profits going to the foundation that Senna had set up to aid underprivileged children in Brazil.
The original Senna was a mixture of components from the two 916 models, the Strada (street) and the racing SP version. The color scheme was a distinctive gunmetal grey with red wheels with a single seat. The SP frame was used with an Ohlins rear suspension unit and some carbon fiber parts including the front mudguard, rear chain guard, clutch cover and exhaust pipe heat shield. Production was pegged at 301 individually numbered units for the 1995 year, and there were plans to produce an Mk2 version for 1996. These came unstuck early in that year when Senna’s brother-in-law died while riding one of the original production run models. Subsequently, a second run was produced in 1997, and an Mk3 version the following year, both of which varied subtly from the original model.
The Modern Incarnation | Ducati Panigale V4 25° Anniversario
The recent WorldSBK round at Laguna Seca marked a special occasion for Ducati, as it was the scene in which they officially celebrated the 25 milestone of the 916 by unveiling the Ducati Panigale V4 25° Anniversario.
Limited to 500 editions worldwide, the 916 Anniversario gets a few changes over a standard V4 S including the front frame of the V4 R, a racing-style dry clutch, track specific electronics in the Ducati Quick Shift EVO 2 for aggressive gear shifts, and “predictive” Ducati Traction Control EVO 2. There’s also forged magnesium Marchesini Racing wheels, a titanium Akrapovič racing exhaust, and a host of carbon fiber and billet aluminum add-ons, including the front and rear mudguards, heel guards and swingarm cover. To top it all off, you also get a stunning Fogarty-replica paint scheme that mimics the Briton’s final WorldSBK title-winning 996 of 1999.
I was lucky enough to get four laps at Laguna Seca on the Panigale V4 25°Anniversario as part of this feature. This was a quick test, for sure, but I wasn’t going to argue as I was one of the lucky few that were given the keys by Ducati’s International Product Communications manager, Giulio Fabbri.
The Panigale V4 25°Anniversario has that rocking V4 from the standard Panigale V4 S that we tested back in 2018, so the huge power on offer was no great surprise, but the extra stiffness thanks to the Panigale V4 R front frame was certainly apparent.
The Panigale V4 25°Anniversario was also a little more nimble compared to what I remembered when I tested the V4 S back in Valencia, making the quick direction changes in places like the Corkscrew a little easier than they would have been.
The Panigale V4 25°Anniversario is a stunningly prepared machine, and given the importance of the date, I’d expect these things to be already all sold. The four laps I had were over in a flash, but the ride was a memorable one. CN