VOL. 51 ISSUE 47 NOVEMBER 25, 2014 P71
better dose of midrange power
from 7,000 rpm on up, and by
the lighter stock crank assem-
bly, making it noticeably quicker-
revving than previous versions of
the bike. But it pays to run the en-
gine right out to the point where
at 11,500 rpm the highly legible
stock dash flashes bright red
to remind you to shift up before
making friends with the limiter
500 revs further along. Do so,
and you'll be rewarded with scin-
tillating high-rpm performance by
twin-cylinder standards.
Fitting the lighter, stronger
conrods surely also helped make
the Panigale's Superquadro en-
gine more durable than before,
an important issue after the sev-
eral engine blowups thanks to
broken steel conrods suffered in
the bike's debut Superstock sea-
son in 2012.
"The engine is now much
more reliable in most aspects,
while still delicate in others," says
Marco Barnabò. "The transmis-
sion problems, especially with
the 1098R's selector forks, are
now a thing of the past, and the
titanium conrods have fixed the
problem we had before. But we
do get crankcases cracking, al-
though this is almost inevitable
because the vibrations that result
from getting a 112mm-bore V-twin
to run at 12,000 rpm and effec-
tively produce 210 bhp have to be
taken into account—you can't get
that kind of performance for free.
A four-cylinder engine producing
the same horsepower via smaller
pistons has it easy by compari-
son—but we keep a strict note of
mileage and indulge in preventa-
tive maintenance, and that paid
off well this season."
The team naturally uses the
Race riding mode out of the three
available RBW throttle maps
(Race, Sport and Rain) stored in
the Mitsubishi engine manage-
ment system's ECU. Riding with
this delivers a pretty aggressive
pickup out of a turn, with quite
vivid throttle response, but the
Level Two setting (out of eight) for
the DTC/Ducati Traction Control
system, a Level One degree of
intervention (out of three) on the
EBC/ Engine Braking Control,
but the 9ME Bosch ABS fitted as
standard switched off, made the
Ducati pretty controllable to ride
in something approaching an-
ger, and certainly very trustwor-
thy. The wide-open race-pattern
powershifter was set up nicely,
crisp and smooth without such
an abrupt cutout as on the stock
Panigale R model settings ex-fac-
tory, which make it hard to shift
up cleanly without jerking the
