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/128306
mt-7J,~,--- Corse Ducati _ had to win that - and beat its already impr essive 998 sate llite and customer bikes to boot. Ducati Corse also supplied the same huge level of regular custom ers who pay a premium for its products, safe in the knowledge that it can then win Superb ike nationals all over t he world. Oh , and more recently Cors e has also had to develop a racing version of the 749 , to take on the most intimidating bunch of Japanese 600s ever assembled next year. It puts the Marlboro Ducati team's per formances in some kind of even more In World $uperbike, only Ducati could show Honda the way home more often than not Now in MotoGP it is tailing the big H, but not by that much, and is already way ahead of much bigger companies - after just its first year. taly and th us Europe has never quite see n t he like s of Duc at i Corse in mot o rcycle raci ng t erms. Aprilia has come close , but all leaps outside the small-stroke r envelope have had little measurable success. We have watched Ducati Corse beat all come rs in World Supe rbike with regular ity, watched it supply competitive bikes to half the world for do mestic racing, watched it redouble its efforts after being beaten by Honda and w itnessed it unflinchingly demot e or ditch ride rs who didn't make the grade . And now even a MotoGP legend like Kenny Roberts can co unt himself among the admirers of the way Ducati has kicked butt in World Supe rbike and now MotoGP. How can one small factory, a minnow comp ared to any of the Japanese sharks, have outdone most of them with its firstever V-four prototy pe racer? After watching Ducati Cors e study form , join and then win in MotoGP at the first attempt in modern times, and keep its World Superbike and National Superbike efforts firmly on beam, the realizatio n dawned that the "how?" is simple enough, if com plex in practice . In creating Ducati Co rse in 1999, Ducati Motor had copied - witt ingly or ot herwise the format laid out by just about the most successful racing entity of alltime: the Honda Racing Cor poration, o r HRC to you and me. I 40 JANUARY 14, 200 4 • The ways of Honda's company organization are inscru table and labyrinthine , but in HRC Honda has an arm co mpletely devoted to racing, staffed by engineers w ith a tast e for the top step in numer ous classes, and with Honda 's money t here to pay for their engineering experimentat ion. In Ducat; Corse, Ducati Motor has a separat e but who lly owned comp any staffed largely by young and gifted engineers, who are all immersed complete ly in racing but ar e unde rstandably facing very different financial circu mstances from Hond a. Its numbers are ce rtainly fewer, its means of gather ing funding are som et imes different but the key facets of Ducati Cors e and HRC rem ain sol id unde r closer inspection. They have autonomy of purpose and t he CYCLE NEWS same de mands placed on them - winning and winning all the time . This need for victo ry, not just go to racing for corpo rate pride like some others, is the main reason why the HRC analogy see med obvious in t he first instance, even if there are as many differences as similarities. It's easy to look at Ducati's MotoGP successes this seaso n and think it remarkable for such a small company (maybe 120 or so full timers ) to fo rm the only credible threat to the Hond a hordes allseason - but the re is so much more to it than this. With a new 999 F03 to race in World Superbike, the cham pionship that first saved and then regenerated Ducat; as a viable industrial entity (thanks largely to the 888s and t hen 9 16/955/998 dynasty), Ducati also 40 t h Anniv ersary impressive pe rspect ive. Such was Ducati's instant speed in MotoGP that HRC had to plug the next level of performance into the awesome RC211V at midseason to keep in contention with Troy Bayliss and Lo ris Capirossi's sometimes wayward wonderb ikes. Now you know why the evide nce demands that we pay Ducati Corse the com pliment of calling it Europe's HRC and, as I found out, the unwitting error of drawing too many parallels with HRC. After all, HRC is a company that could possibly spend more money and man-hours on a camshaft design than Ducati does on a whole new engine, and it has the separate but related Honda R&D Co. Ltd. as a close working partner to boot. (Ducati's racing R&D department is contained within Corse itself, although obvious crossovers with the streetbike guysoccur with the Superbike and Supersport machines.) To get to the bottom of how and w hy Ducati Corse has taken the highground in so many champ ionships, questions were asked of three of the key men in the racing des mo firmament - CEO Claudio Domenical i, MotoGP sporting director Livio Suppo and SBK sporting director Paolo Ciabatt i. Their comm ents were made in their natural envi- ronments - Domenicalifrom Ducati Corse at Borgo Panigale, Suppo in Rio at a Gp, and Ciabatt i at the penultimate SBK meet ing in Imola. We we re also given photographic access to the inner sanctu m of D ucati C o rse , where new and exist ing Ducati racebikes of all shapes and sizes jostle for atten tion on design comp uters and workshops. CLAUDIO DOMENICALI Domenicali presides over a small but inte nse bunch of technical. sport ing, commercial and marketing personnel, who not only make racing bikes, but also sell the Corse Brand to potential spo nsors. Ducati has bee n even more successful at this than anything else, with around 70 percent of operational costs being paid for by a blizzard of sponsors, fro m the Marlboro, Fila and Shell millions to the one giving out free pasta for the teams' hospitalityunits. Yes, really ... Significant t hen that Domenicali is an engineer, but also that the sporting heads of the MotoGP and World Superbike pro jects are basically marketing and admin peo ple. As Domenicali's expansive answer to the first questio n bears out, it's not just about the motorbikes.