ON THE ROAD...

Perched on the narrow Ducati, feeling the rumble of the big twin below and watching the mirrors shake themselves to within an inch of their lives, I couldn’t help but unleash a wry grin behind my dark visor.

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What I’d just done was perhaps not that saintly, but the buzz off the back of blitzing this thing around my favourite backroads was preventing the sensible part of my brain from kicking into action. It'd been a long time since a motorcycle had felt so refreshingly playful, engaging, and so effortless to abuse, performing in step with my ambitions to seek and destroy each and every apex that'd come our way. Many months after pulling the pin on the Pani around a racetrack, I'd finally had that chance to scratch an itch and figure firsthand how well it’d cut it outside of a circuit... and the only thing it hadn’t done was disappoint.

Of course, I'd had high hopes of this outcome, fuelled by the factory's speculation that they'd built a machine that would prove as credible on the street as it was on the racetrack – which is no mean feat. The last time I checked, only Hovis was touting the best of both worlds, but somehow Ducati has managed to mirror that kind of magic, delivered to your doorstep with a numberplate and all.

I'll level with you: I’m a sucker for lower horsepower motorcycles. And while there'll be some that consider 119bhp to be more than enough for anyone, anywhere, any day of the week, I'd counter that by saying for the last decade or so, the majority of the bikes I’ve spent my time gripping onto have kicked out about 200bhp... such as Ducati’s very own Panigale V4 that claims a mind-warping 214bhp in stock trim. The point being, from the very first mile of the hundreds I clocked on the V2, it felt pleasurably less intense and demanding on my body and mind than the norm, meaning I could enjoy the ride in a way I don’t often get to. But don’t for one minute consider this a suggestion that the V2’s slow. Far from it.