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/128331
By MICHAEL IN rHE PADDOCK SCOTT Going Backward t's a strange kind of racing progress that goes backward . Especiallyw hen the name involved is Ducati. The rightly revered racing com pany burst into MotoGP last year to challenge the Japanese domination, claiming a debut seaso n win and new topspeed records almost everywhere. It came back this year - only to be beaten by not on ly Honda and Yamaha, but even by its own year-o ld motorcycle in the sate llite d'Antin team. With a rookie, Ruben Xaus, riding it. World Super bike observers will be aware that this is not the first time Ducati has made mistakes in overly ambitious deve lopment of a new factory bike. And, after all, the person who never made a mistake never made anything. What is more surprising is the state Ducati has got itself into trying to dea l with the situation. Its team and chosen factory riders Loris Capirossi and Troy Bayliss are by now thoroughly confused , with two different types of bike in their garage, and no really clear idea of which is actually the better. Both raced the new Twin-Pulse at the Dutch Grand Prix in Assen , after switching back and forth in practice . Xaus beat them both . Again. Clarity of thinking is a key ingredient of racing success. When it is Fridayand you still don't know which bike you will be racing on Sunday, you have a recipe for the exact opposite. And every chance of ending up in a real flap. The two bikes are indeed very different, tho ugh outwardly similar. The "standard" model has the powerful but wheels pin-prone "Four-Pulse," the firing beats spread out over two turns of the crank. This is the o ne with an evocative exhaust note , the Ferrari of t he Mot oGP class. I The other is the "Twin-Pulse," w here adjacent cylinders fire simultaneously, to emulate the pulses of a V-twin. Except that the new Twin-Pulse is different from the crankcase-breaking first version, almost certai nly with the cylinders firing a coup le of degrees apart, to reduce the destructive forces w hile still behaving more or less like a twin. It has a flat droning exhaust, coming from four massive individual tailpipes. The significance is not so much that this engine has reappeared in revised form - after having bee n discarded soon after the start of the project - but that Ducati is doing it in the middle of the season . That smacks of des peration. So did the events leading up to this situation. The '04 Desmosedici has been a handful from the first tests . Chassis changes intended to improve braking stability had another effect as well, reducing stability in fast corners. Nondefending World Superbike Champ ion Neil Hodgson has had his own prob lems, but teammate Xaus has, in between crashes, been litt le short of sen- sational, esp ecially over recent race s, where he has outqualified and outraced the factory machines on his year-old customer Desmosedici. Ducat i Corse's first response was to wheel out some year-old bikes for their own riders to test. In fact, it wasn't that simple. They had to build new old bikes out of parts for the exercise. Some weight distribution changes to the new one followed. The next act, after Xaus' strong fifth at Mugello, was to put the Spanish exSuperbiker onto the new bike at private tests at the Italian track. He was immed iate ly faster than the regular pair, who needed qualifying tires to match his times . This doubtless put a rocket under each of them, as if they were not already feeling uncomfortably humbled. But it didn't really solve anything, except to make everyone feel even more unsett led. The Twin-Pulse was tested after the last race in Catalunya, where Xaus had again been the first Duke to finish. It was good enough for them to bring two of the new bikes to Assen. Then the weather www.cyclenews.com conspired against them. Instead of being able to run back-to-back tests of the two bikes, the factory riders were (along with everyone else) left scrambling in the single dry session. Bayliss qualified the FourPulse, but that was only because his TwinPulse was hors de com bat, set up fo r a wet track and useless in the dry final session. Both raced the Twin-Pulse, and methinks we have probably now seen the last of the '04 Four-Pulse, at least for a while. But have we seen the end of Ducati's problems? Will the factory guys start beating the privateer '03 bike, like it says in the script? Probably so, sooner or later. Ducat i Corse may be in a muddle right at the moment, but they remain a highly focused , motivated, experienced, dedicated (and, dare one add, passionate) group of racing nutters. They must be pleased, however, that there aren't any '02 Desmosedicis in existence. Just imagine how well Ruben Xaus would be able to go on an even older Ducati. eN CYCLE NEWS • JULY 7,2004 123