Roarin' Through The Hills

We had to find out what the record-setting multistrada is like and Ducati happened to have a pikes peak lying around for the ride. Didn’t take much to put the two together.

- Debabrata Sarkar

There’s a Termignoni exhaust screaming out high revs and the noise is bouncing off the mountain wall on my right. The surface is flawless and the traffic, incredibly light. The corners are flowing from one to the next and I can count the number of cars that have gone past in the last half hour on my fingertips. But then, I have better things to do with my fingers, two of them tapping the brake lever, sitting behind the knuckle guard. The only thing I need to watch out for are stray stones that have rolled down the hillside, onto the road and are strewn around corners. This may not be Pikes Peak and the road isn’t really climbing, but it is an epic stretch rolling through the ridge line, high up in the mountains and I could not have asked for a better ride perched on the saddle of a, err, Pikes Peak, the motorcycle.

Yes, that’s what you see in pictures here, the 2018 Ducati Multistrada 1260 Pikes Peak. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but then, you can let that pass, especially for a motorcycle that set the fastest time at the hill climb, from where it derives its name, a couple of months back. Yes, this same version – a big touring motorcycle – did that and all the help that it had came from a set of racing slicks, a different handlebar and a heavy duty master cylinder for the front brakes. Oh, and a chap called Carlin Dunne, who happens to be crowned ‘King of the Mountain’, every time he points a motorcycle up the Pikes Peak hill, electric or petrol powered.