FIGHT FORMULA

If you thought this bike was audacious before, the 2025-spec Streetfighter V4S has just blown the ceiling off of the sector... unapologetically.

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Imagine if there was a bike that a bang-average fast group trackday rider could take to within 10% of a lap time set by that very bike's lead test rider. Not only that, but to do so at a track that our trackday rider has never seen before, and which is notoriously technical and difficult to learn... in just six 20-minute sessions compared to the test rider's hundreds of laps there over many years. Well, there's no need to imagine it, because the track was the Andalucia circuit, the test rider was Ducati's Allesandro Valia, the trackday rider was... me - and the bike is the 2025 Ducati Streetfighter V4S.

The Andalucia circuit is 5Km long and has 19 turns, of which 10 are blind. Valia has led the development on every road Ducati since 2007, was Italian Superstock Champion in 2002, finished 12th in a WSB which included Bayliss, Corser, Haga, Bostrom and Edwards to name just a few, and can still set lap times on road bikes that would qualify on the back of a WSB grid at some circuits. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, I'm 52 years old, have a middle age spread, and I am well past my prime when it comes to going for a lap time, unlike the Streetfighter V4, which is the absolute pinnacle of production motorcycle engineering on every single level.