DUCATI RELEASES SPECIAL EDITION WSBK

And Motogp Celebration Panigales

Fair play to Ducati – the Bologna rm utterly smashed it last year in both the MotoGP and WSBK. Team Red took not only the rider’s title in both championships thanks to Pecco Bagnaia and Álvaro Bautista, but it also snapped up the constructor and team trophies in each class as well.

Winning MotoGP and WSBK in the same year puts you into a pretty special league. Yamaha did it in 2021, of course, with Fabio Quartararo and Toprak Razgatlıo lu. But you have to go back to 2009 for the last time it happened before that, again for Yamaha, when Valentino Rossi and Ben Spies won MotoGP and WSBK respectively. Rossi and

Colin Edwards did it for Honda in 2002 on an RC211V and VTR1000 SP-2, as did Mick Doohan and John Kocinski in 1997 (NSR500 and RC45) and Eddie Lawson with Fred Merkel in 1989 (NSR500 and RC30).

It’s probably fair enough that Ducati wants to mark the occasion with something a bit special – like this brace of posh limitededition Panigale V4 S specials. There’s one for MotoGP, painted in the Lenovo Factory team colours, and one for WSBK with the Aruba.it livery, and both are signed by their respective title-winning riders.

Both have almost the same spec, based on the 2023 version of the 216bhp/174kg Panigale V4S. They’ve been treated to a stack of sweet bolt-on parts from the Ducati Performance catalogue, including a road-legal Akrapovic pipe that saves a couple of kilos, a nine-disc STM-EVO SBK dry clutch, Rizoma rearsets and race windscreen. There’s a sprinkling of carbon bre panels for the exhaust heat shield, front and rear mudguards, swingarm protector, engine covers and brake ducts. The only real difference between the two specials is in the fuel tanks: the WSBK rep gets a brushed aluminium tank to echo the V4 R racebike, meaning the MotoGP replica is actually slightly less trick then the proddie racer machine…

Only 260 of each bike will be made and, predictably enough, they all sold out within a couple of days of going on sale. Keep your eyes peeled on Gumtree for any resellers though, you never know…

Ducati also had its best-ever sales gures in 2022, shifting no less than 61,562 bikes around the world. And the top seller was the frankly insane Multistrada V4 superadventure bike – more than 10,000 of those were sold in 2022 and are now no doubt wheelieing about the place at very high speed.

Ducati’s total sales gure is up 3% on 2021, which is pretty impressive when you consider the state the world is in. Top work.