Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 7 FEBRUARY 19, 2014 P89 – though you are parked very noticeably much further forward than on the old 1098R/1198. This is most likely to help load up the front wheel with your body weight to help counter wheelies, and above all to deliver extra grip in turns. The RS13 Panigale felt tauter and stiffer compared to Checa's Althea Ducati 1098R I tested a couple of years ago, which like all the tube-frame Ducatis seemed like a comfortable pair of old shoes - with outstanding feedback though at the expense of precision. It was a true flexi-flyer, but in a good sense. One spinoff benefit of its more forgiving nature was when grip became an issue, but on the other hand if you really leaned on the brakes, for exam- ple, it moved around quite a bit, meaning you had to work harder to hold a line. The Panigale is the complete opposite. The Checa RS13 steered brilliantly into turns, where I had more feedback from the front Pirelli on a cold but dry track than I'd been expecting. It was definitely more stable un- der hard braking, and especially when trailbraking into an apex using the outstanding 320mm Brembo front discs (downsized from the 330mm jumbo stoppers on the Superstock bike). There's no need for the huge 336mm Brembo Tipo H discs fitted to the Sykes Kawasaki, because the Ducati isn't so fast - but the upside of that is that the Italian V-twin's sweet steering isn't com- promised by the increased gyro- scopic weight of the larger discs. However, it's reportedly much more time-consuming to dial in the right setup for the Panigale at each track, and that's one rea- son why in its debut year, without any previous data from running the same radical departure from previous Ducati designs at a given circuit, it sometimes didn't happen. Davies and Giugliano will at least have the benefit of 2013 data in readying the bike for Friday morning practice at each round. Believe me, I was only too well aware before riding it of this bike's reputation for turning all its riders into crashers. But as far as I'm concerned after my brief ride at Jerez, this didn't come from any innate handling defects because of the Panigale's ultra-stiff uni- tary chassis package. To remind you, this has the engine acting as the central component, with the single-sided swingarm pivoting in the crankcases as on all Ducati Superbikes, but the Öhlins front suspension now connected to the motor via a diecast semi- monocoque aluminum structure, which doubles as the airbox. This format has been jettisoned on Ducati's MotoGP bikes, but works perfectly well on the Pani- gale R in both street and Super- stock guise on stock Supercorsa SP tires. While I had some trepi- dation about how the RS13 would handle with even grippier slick tires, I shouldn't have worried. There's plenty good feedback from both ends of the bike, and the main reason for this is prob- ably the more compliant Pirelli Superbike rubber, as compared to the much stiffer and less for- giving MotoGP Bridgestones. Deprived via its ultra short- stroke 112 x 60.8 mm dimen- sions of the legendary grunt of its ultra-torquey 106 x 67.9mm 1098R/1198 predecessor, the Panigale motor simply doesn't have the zap out of a corner that the old bike did. And, more to the point, that its four-cylinder ri- vals now have, especially thanks to the differential throttle strat- egy that ride by wire now permits Did the Panigale suffer because of Ducati's concentration on MotoGP?

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