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2018 DUCATI 1299 SUPERLEGGERA FIRST TEST P110 ing yourself that you can take a big handful of brake on the angle deep into a turn on a hub-center bike like a Bimota Tesi or Vyrus— it's only when you break through the mental barrier of doing so just once and find you haven't crashed, that you've repro- grammed your mental mindset. Well, towards the end of my stint on the Superleggera I was getting the hang of doing this at Palagio, the exit of the tightest of the chicanes and probably the slowest corner on the track. But I could honestly feel the rear Pirelli SC1 race tire the Ducati was wearing for my test starting to walk under me there, without digging in and highsiding me, while at the same time avoiding running too wide for the exit, but staying close to the left for the next right-hander at Correntaio. I can't wait for the trickle-down ef- fect to take place so I can try to improve my DSC technique on something that doesn't cost 90K new, and a mountain of cash to fix crash damage! But hard though it is to ignore the extra power and greater torque of this EVO-motor, it's the very refined handling of the 1299 Superleggera that really im- presses. However, to begin with, I found myself doing something I hadn't been prepared for: over- steering into the apex of a turn, which meant I repeatedly had to pick the Ducati up again, and correct my line. I've been riding on carbon wheels ever since 1994, when I began helping Dymag develop such a design by racing on them, so I know how much they influence turn-in and steering, which is a huge amount, and I'm always ready to compensate for them. You have to focus on being more delicate in steering the bike, which I'd thought I was doing. But then I realized that I hadn't taken into account the even lighter weight of the new Superleggera's carbon fiber chassis compared to its 1199 predecessor's mag- nesium frame, or indeed the Davies/Melandri aluminium item, as well as all the copious other black magic bits on this uber- desmo V-twin sportbike. This made the Superleg- gera even lighter steering than the Chaz Davies Superbike I last rode at Imola 18 months ago, when flicking from side to side in the quartet of Mugello chicanes. I thought I might be imagining this until Ducati test rider Alessandro Valia confirmed Carbon fiber semi-monocoque doubling as the airbox bolts to the top of the 90-degree V-twin desmo engine.