Cycle News

Cycle News 2019 Issue 01 January 8

Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles

Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1068866

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2019 DUCATI PANIGALE V4 R FIRST IMPRESSION P114 bikes. One presumes the stock Euro 4-compliant street exhaust is even friendlier in its function. What's more, this was in Race mode out of the choice of three available. Sport and Street are the other two, all delivering full power, but with different degrees of throttle response. And there's no Rain mode. The V4 R motor builds speed very fast, pulling irresistibly rather than explosively but with a huge sense of purpose, until an orange shifter light appears across the top left of the same five-inch TFT dash as on the V4 S at 14,500 rpm, then a red one on the right at 15,000. The high revs are made pos- sible by the absence of valve springs on this desmodromic engine, allowing the use of more radical camshaft design along- side the lightweight internals and reduced friction from items like the two-ring ultra-slipper forged aluminum pistons delivering the high 14:1 compression ratio, an- other reason for the V4 R's super- strong drive out of turns. There's no hard cutout when you reach the 16,000 rpm rev- limiter—the RBW digital throttle simply downs tools, and stops pulling. Below that, the famed nirvana of a direct connection via the throttle pickup between your right hand and the rear Pirelli slick fitted for our test, is very much present. Despite there being so much power and such extremes of performance on tap, this is a super-controllable motorcycle with a well-controlled power delivery, even when ridden in something approaching anger on a race track. LIKE A GLOVE Then there's the handling. Basi- cally, the V4 R's black-painted cast aluminum abbreviated twin-spar chassis is the same so-called 'Front Frame' design as on the V4 S, but with less metal behind the steering head to deliver a little more flex aka "optimized stiffness" (WorldSBK regs allow the addition of material to the frame, but not the removal of any). That's important for Chaz and Alvaro, but less so for the likes of us, so it wasn't so tragic that the test bikes weren't yet equipped with this frame configuration that's yet to be manufactured in volume for production. But the geometry is identical between the two—the only difference is in the degree of flex, and of course a small amount of weight. The single-sided cast Edoardo Lenoci says the wings offer 35 lb of downforce at 125 mph, and 66 lb at 165 mph. forceful in selecting bottom gear for the slow Curva Lorenzo final hairpin leading on to the start/ finish straight. There, I got a false neutral going from second to first half a dozen times, though maybe this would be less of an issue with more mileage on the gearbox to loosen it up. Either that, or use second gear as Chaz told me he does. POWER PL AY From 13,000 rpm onwards, the variable length intake funnels lift to shorten the intake paths, so that the higher-lift race-spec camshafts can start to do their work. You honestly don't feel this transition—and knowing it was there, I did look for it, but there's no trace of any steps in the power delivery. Instead, there's just a strong, relentless build of revs and the power they deliver—and this was with the Akrapovic titanium race exhaust system fitted to all four of our test

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