DUCATI LEAD DEVELOPMENT RIDER ALESSANDRO VALIA
P80
Interview
more on rider comfort, passenger
comfort, aerodynamic protection,
the confidence and how friendly
the bike is with the rider.
It's a completely different ap-
proach, but we want to keep also
the racing DNA of Ducati, so in
the Multistrada you'll find a com-
fortable bike you can use also
for a long trip, but when you twist
the grip you feel the racing heart
of the Ducati.
The Multistrada was one of
the first bikes that pioneered
the use of electronic suspen-
sion. How has that changed in
the past decade?
We were quite early pioneers in
this technology. We understood
immediately that it was really
good for the rider and for the
vehicle. We started working on
the software that works with this
suspension, and we develop all
these years new functionalities to
have a real-time suspension setup
on the vehicle.
The Multistrada is, I think, the
example of this work where the
system reacts immediately when
you find a hole on a normal road
or when you make some maneu-
ver like braking, accelerating,
wheelieing, or leaning the bike.
So, we change in real time the
damping of the suspension, and
on the shock, we work on the
preload of the spring in order to
change the load mode.
There are different tech-
nologies behind the system. For
example, in the Multistrada, we
have semi-active suspensions
where we work in real time on the
setting, and they are very, very
fast changing the damping—going
from the maximum damping to the
minimum in some milliseconds.
On the Panigale before, and
on other supersport implications,
we have the event-based suspen-
Part of the
gig is ferrying
journalists around
for the early
stages of a test.
