STREETS AHEAD

Ducat's new sub-litre naked might be a little more conforming than its predecessor, but it's definitely no less exceptional. In fact, it's mind-blowingly good...

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A few years ago I was on the launch of the then new Ducati Streetfighter V2 at Monteblanco race circuit, which is notoriously fast, and getting round it quickly requires power, lots of it. So, with its 155bhp engine and trick chassis, the Streetfighter V2 was great fun in that environment... less so when we got one on the road for our middleweight naked bikes test.

On the road, and alongside bikes which had less power and less weight, the Ducati felt a bit lazy and too dependent on its powerful engine to deliver kicks. That engine and its big price tag kind of made the Streetfighter V2 fall between two stools. It had a load more power that the other bikes that it actually didn’t need to deliver on its brief and a price tag that separated it from the pack by such a margin that it was on the cusp on not being included in the test at all.

As it turns out, Ducati also knew this and, as we already know, has reinvented and thus repositioned the V2 variants of the Panigale and Streetfighter. Dialling them both down and going down a different path in line with the competition, the two all-new V2s have opened up a new world of possibilities commercially, but crucially for us consumers, Ducati has either by accident or design made a bike with the Streetfighter V2, the likes of which I can’t remember the brand ever producing. The Streetfighter V2 is comfortably the most fun bike to come out of Bologna certainly in my lifetime.

At the heart of the latest V2 is the new 890cc engine which debuted in the Panigale V2 and which itself represents a new philosophy for Ducati - in so much as gone is the hallmark desmodromic valve train, replaced with a conventional set-up to not only keep cost and weight down, but also to respect the brief of the bike.