#ducati

In a race he really didn’t need to win, on a day he might have preferred sitting in an air-conditioned hotel suite ordering room service and watching Ozzie & Harriet reruns, Marc Marquez dismissed his main MotoGP title challenger without so much as a “by your leave.” Turning the tables on Andrea Dovizioso in a final turn cutback, Marquez now has a magic number as the Pacific Flyaway beckons. Otherwise, the inaugural Grand Prix of Thailand was a smashing success all around.

The 2018 MotoGP season grinds on, a feeling of inevitability having settled over the grid. Marc Marquez will secure his fifth premier class world championship on the Pacific swing, followed by some locally-themed, over-the-top celebration prepared in advance. He has guys for that. Meanwhile, the rest of the grid is flailing away at a top-something finish; in the higher tranches, that would be top three. In the lower tranches, perhaps top ten. What can one say? It’s The Marquez Era.

Four years ago, said Claudio Domenicali the CEO, Ducati launched its first Scrambler at Intermot here in Koln, which was really like starting a new brand for Ducati. A brand to make Ducati more accessible, and a really successful one so they say, with more than 55,000 units sold since 2015.

Okay, the days are getting shorter, and the temperatures are staying lower. Perhaps even the leaves have started to turn in your neighborhood. That’s great news! Why? Because the Model Year 2019 show season is kicking off today in Cologne, Germany, at the bi-annual Intermot convention. That’s right, in even-numbered years, we don’t have to wait until the EICMA show in November to begin seeing what all the international motorcycle manufacturers have up their collective sleeves. While your actual riding season may be drawing to a close, we hope to keep you daydreaming about motorcycles with a list of new temptations.

We teased you recently with a dyno shootout between the Aprilia RSV4 RF and the Ducati Panigale V4 S, with the Ducati blowing the doors off the less powerful – and smaller displacing – Aprilia to the tune of 187 hp for the Panigale and 168 hp for the RSV4. This set the stage for our track shootout between the two Italians nicely, as on paper, anyway, the Ducati seemingly has the Aprilia’s number. A bigger engine clearly gives it a power advantage, while 20 pounds less mass on the official MO scales and electronic Öhlins suspension prevails over the RSV4’s extra heft and manual Öhlins bits. But what does that all translate to once the tire warmers come off and fast lap times need to be set?

Here’s a quick 50-second teaser vid for the upcoming film “Venom,” in which Ducati North America CEO Jason Chinnock explains how the Scrambler reflects the lead character, Eddie, played by Tom Hardy. Does the bike wag the film or vice versa? The bike influences the stunts for sure, says Chinnock. “The bike helps move the action sequences along.” We’ll buy that. Ever since Mike Vaughn made them buy three Kawasaki Ninja 900s, movies have sold a lot of motorcycles.

I’ve owned class-leading motorcycles with plenty of tech and performance for many years, but my time at Motorcycle.com has taught me how much fun middleweight bikes can be. Like every other member of the staff here, I too get all hot under my leathers waiting for the latest technology to trickle down from MotoGP into production sportbikes or monstrous 1200-plus cc naked bikes that have enough torque to dislocate your arms. But sometimes riding a bike that’s not so extreme can be relieving and an absolute blast to scoot around on.

Since Sachsenring, Marc Marquez had grown weary hearing about how great the Ducati is, how great Andrea Dovizioso and Jorge Lorenzo are, how they’ve been making a chump out of him since August. Marc Marquez, despite his calm exterior, is a fiercely competitive young man. Today, with no pressure and no real incentive other than pride, he went out and beat Dovizioso in front of his home fans, assuring them that he may be many things, but one of them is not a chump.

Mid-September and it’s come down to this, for the handful of riders (other than Marc Marquez) entertaining increasingly unlikely notions of winning the 2018 title. For the remainder of the season, it’s win or bin. No more brave smiles from the second step of the podium. In the lasting words of the late Roy Orbison, “It’s Now or Never.” Unless you get stoked finishing, you know, second, or third.

Ahead of our press introduction of the 2019 Ducati Scrambler Icon, we’ve received details of some of the nuances surrounding the upcoming model release. The Italian firm will continue to push its Land of Joy branding campaign that has surrounded the Scrambler marque since its inception in 2015. This latest “Joyvolution” focuses on new safety features and updated styling components, which add an “extra layer of untroubled freedom.”

2018 will go down in Bologna, Italy as the first year Ducati recorded MotoGP wins at both Mugello and Misano. As expected, the contest quickly devolved into another Marquez vs. Desmosedici doubleteam, #93 spending a solid part of the day cruising in third. When Jorge Lorenzo stunned the 97,000 fans by sliding out of second place on Lap 26, Marc Marquez glommed onto the second step of the podium and added another crushing 8 points to his 2018 lead. When you can win while losing, you are The Man.

The last three iterations of what used to be known as the Misano round in MotoGP have found factory Honda riders standing on the top step of the podium: Marc Marquez in 2015 and 2017 and Dani Pedrosa in 2016. The first was a rare double flag-to-flag affair, the second dry, the third wet. The conditions do not appear to matter. Can showman Valentino Rossi stiff-arm Marquez and find a way to put on a late-career memory-maker in front of his homeys? The bells of Tavullia beckon.

On a humid and hazy southern California morning our cast of misfits began to stir to life from all stretches of the LA basin. Showers were had (by some), coffee was made and consumed, gear was donned. We seven fortunate souls set out on what would be our first true challenge of the next 72 hours, the first gauntlet that our machines would be subjected to, weekday traffic in Los Angeles with a destination of none other than Starbucks. The unofficial meeting place of adventure riders the world over, yet, for so many, the journey’s end before it ever even begins.

The entire weekend devoted to the GoPro British Grand Prix seemed to be accompanied by a sense of foreboding due to the weather. One had the sense that dry practice sessions and a wet race could lead to carnage and confusion; Exhibit A occurred near the end of FP4. In the end, the carnage and confusion was restricted mainly to the race organizers, sponsors and rider Tito Rabat. After hours and hours of hemming and hawing, the British round of the 2018 MotoGP season was scrubbed.

Without a doubt, the biggest news in the sportbike scene for 2018 is Ducati’s Panigale V4 and the emergence of a mass-produced four cylinder engine – the Stradale V4. While Ducati has finally left its beloved V-Twin engine behind (at least in terms of superbikes), there was no way the folks in Borgo Panigale would conform to tradition when it came to its new four-banger. For starters, as the name implies, the new engine is arranged as a 90º V4 – essentially multiplying  its V-Twin tradition by two.