Battle Ready

Need a motorcycle that will climb mountains, carve canyons, travel the world and looks like a battle tank? This might be the moment your dreams come true…

- Ashok George

If this thing falls, I’m definitely losing a leg. That’s the part of my brain that is deathly scared of large ADVs. You see, every time I’m faced with a large ADV, my brain instantly starts conjuring up images of me hobbling around with a stump for a leg. And last I checked, there aren’t many requirements for swashbuckling, wooden-legged pirates any more.

I was at the Castello Nipozzano in Italy, home of Ducati’s DRE Enduro and Beppe Gaulini’s playground – where the Ducati Multistrada Enduro was dreamed up and fine-tuned.

As technical director of DRE Enduro, Gaulini is a decorated veteran of the off-road motorcycling world. Among the feathers in his cap are 10 editions of the Paris-Dakar as well as 65 African rally raids. And he was putting on his helmet to take us through the trails that surround the castle to get a feel of the new Multistrada 1260 Enduro.

The Enduro isn’t an all-new motorcycle. In its 1200 guise, it has been around for a while. But like Ducati did with the 1200S, the Enduro too has had a refresh that has been aimed at making it more capable than before. And that is a tall order.

The older Enduro was a very capable machine. If you remember the launch video with Gaulini and his guys launching the Enduro into air and going through hard-enduro territory like it was just another day at work, you will know what I’m on about.

So, how do you improve something that is already so great? You make it even more capable, even more accessible and even more desirable. And to do that, they started by putting the 1200 Enduro under a microscope and surgically removing the little imperfections.