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/262687
DUCATI PANIGALE 1199 RS13 RACER TEST P88 end one year early. Yet it had all seemed so promising at the start of the season, when Checa had qualified on pole for the bike's debut race at Phillip Island, after Ducati had held back the Super- bike homologation for the model launched early in 2012 for one year, "for development reasons." But that pole was the high- light of the season, and it was all downhill after that. Under those circumstances, it was very noble of Ducati's World Superbike Director Ernesto Mari- nelli to allow me a handful of laps on the Checa RS13 on a dull but dry Jerez day 48 hours after the final round of the season – and the day after I'd ridden Tom Sykes' championship-winning Kawasaki ZX-10R at the same track. This gave a hands-on appreciation of the scale of the mountain that Ducati's engineers have to climb for the 2014 season opening at Phillip Island in February, espe- cially with two new riders, Chaz Davies and Davide Giugliano, in a team now once again run by Bologna-based Feel Racing - ar- chitects of seven of Ducati's array of World Superbike titles, includ- ing all three won by Troy Bayliss. But the arrival of Gigi Dall'Igna to run Ducati Corse, fresh from his achievement in making the Aprilia RSV4 the dominant force in World Superbike racing, per- haps promises better days for the desmo V-twins. I first rode a few laps on Nic- colò Canepa's 1199 Panigale R, on which the former MotoGP rider finished second to Barrier's BMW in the 2013 FIM Super- stock series after earlier leading the title chase, thus proving the Panigale to be pretty competitive in standard trim with essentially just a race pipe and shock. Indeed, doing so reminded me very closely of the Panigale R streetbike, especially in the way it unquestionably changes direc- tion faster and more easily than any previous Ducati V-twin - pre- sumably thanks to the centraliza- tion of the engine package, the reduced gyroscopic effect of the lighter crankshaft assembly, and especially the downsized rotating mass of the flywheel. This attribute was transferred to the Checa RS13 Superbike when I switched to that – it felt like a Supersport 600 in mak- ing the quick flick from right to left accelerating hard away from the slow right Dry Sack corner at the end of Jerez's main straight. The Ducati's greater agility meant I could get harder on the power sooner than on the less flickable Kawasaki, and without experi- encing any of the chatter that is reported to have plagued the bike all season long on the new- for-2013 17-inch Pirelli tires – though it should be noted I was on new rubber. The RS13 was also relative- ly spacious to sit on in a way I hadn't expected from a bike that at the same time felt pretty minus- cule compared to the Kawasaki