Ducati Desmosedici GP7
Casey's Cannonball
Let's face it: We all like it when the little guy wins. When the underdog upsets the odds. When ingenuity, passion and determination all pay off-including the foresight to gamble on building a bike like the Ducati Desmosedici GP7.
The chance to ride Casey Stoner's bike at the annual promofest press test after the Valencia GP promised to give at least the hint of an answer as to how the modern-day David triumphed over Goliath. Only one thing was wrong-well, two, actually. A crowd of people slated to ride the Ducati meant each person was limited to only four laps on the GP7. And to top it all off? "We know the track conditions aren't so good first thing in the morning after the overnight cold, so we need an experienced pair of hands to start the test," said Ducati PR exec Federica de Zottis. "You're up first!"
Well, of course I did as I was asked, rather than spit the dummy-wouldn't you? But this glimpse of the promised land was doubly frustrating because the Ducati is so different from all the other bikes. For a start it has quite different architecture from its Japanese rivals, being longer, lower and more voluptuous to look at. The seat is much lower than on the others, but it has a very distinctive riding position with extremely high footrests plus a wide and flat angle to the clip-on handlebars, where I'd expected steeply dropped clip-ons befitting someone from the 125/250GP classes like Stoner. "Don't forget, I'm a dirt-track graduate. That's where I learned how to race back home in Oz as a kid," Stoner explained about his bar angle.
After climbing aboard and settling into the hot seat I found the ergos to be surprisingly spacious, except for those high footpegs. They made the race-pattern gearbox quite hard to backshift on because of the raised lever that's also lifted to stop it from grounding at full lean. (According to telemetry graphs Stoner frequently leans over as far as 60 degrees from vertical.) Firing up the GP7 on the rollers produced a glorious sound from the twin 2-into-1 exhausts. The "screamer"-firing-order engine used this year has allowed Ducati to revert to these, in contrast to the four separate megaphones required by the old "Twin Pulse" 990. The lumpy, offbeat, 3000-rpm idle speed is deliberately set high to help offset engine braking when you close the ride-by-wire throttle entering a turn.
The fact that you can't easily read the tachometer isn't important, because the Ducati's broad spread of power makes it almost unnecessary. I expected the GP7's delivery to be quite peaky and the powerband relatively narrow, in pursuit of that all-conquering performance-but if anything it was quite the opposite. Though it doesn't pull quite as strongly from down low as the Suzuki and Kawasaki, the Ducati accelerates very hard from around 11,000 rpm onwards. There's a meaty spread of midrange power as it builds furiously toward the 19,000-rpm rev limiter dialed in for this press test (20,000-plus rpm in race guise has been rumored). A row of blue lights starts flashing at 18,500 rpm to tell you now might be a good time to upshift, as the Ducati accelerates like a missile while the Marelli anti-wheelie program stops the front wheel from lifting more than a few inches off the ground.
What about the traction control? Well, that only works when you're riding the bike the way it should be ridden. In just four early morning laps I'll admit that in right-handers I wasn't prepared to give it the berries because of concern about tread temps on that side of the tire. Valencia's numerous left-handers were another matter, and there I could revel in the Desmosedici 800's fantastic drive as the Marvel 4 ECU's electronics played a silent part in hooking up the rear tire. Just as when I rode Troy Bayliss' factory V-twin Superbike back in the summer of 2007, there's no sense that ignition advance is being held back or fueling leaned off, or that some unseen hand is winding back the GP7's throttle without your knowing it. There's no machine-gun stutter like Ducati's Superbikes once made, either-just a sense of unseen control that brings confidence in its wake.
But perhaps the biggest surprise in riding the Ducati GP7 is how smooth the response is when you get back on the gas again to drive out of a turn after using the monster power of the Brembo carbon brakes and the effective ramp-style slipper clutch to run deep into the turns. The electronics do their bit in softening the initial response-but only that. While there's none of the fierce power delivery from a closed throttle that the exhaust's raw-edged roar would lead you to expect, that doesn't mean that acceleration is anything less than awesome when you get the GP7 straightened up and fired out of the exit of the turn. Instead, once again the Ducati is simply well controlled. Ducati Corse engineers have cleverly mapped all the electronics to make the GP7 incredibly user-friendly for such a powerful motorcycle. There are myriad adjustments possible, but with just four laps I wasn't about to start playing around with the range of different settings for traction control and engine maps accessible by punching buttons in the busy-looking cockpit.
It's hard to ignore the Desmosedici motor, but as Stoner repeatedly proved it's the overall package that delivers the goods. The Ducati seemed to change direction better than all but the Honda, especially in the two Valencia chicanes where it flicked from side to side much more eagerly than its 990cc GP6 predecessor. And where that bike pushed the front wheel rounding the long left up over the hill leading into the last turn, the 800cc GP7 held a tight line much better. It needs to be kept hard on the gas to do this, but there's no doubt this is a better-steering bike than its predecessor.
I thought before I rode it that the Desmosedici GP7 would be all motor, or that maybe, as a certain Italian rider insists, the Ducati only won the world title because of Bridgestone's superiority or the GP7's high degree of electronic control that makes the pilot less important, F1-style. But it's easy to see it was all that plus Stoner's skill in riding the GP7 exactly as it needed to be ridden, as well as his newfound consistency in finishing every race, thanks mainly to a front tire he could trust. The Ducati GP7 is a bike that is beyond criticism from anyone except its regular rider. Only on tight, twisty tracks like Sachsenring and Valencia was it anything other than totally dominant; and judging by Stoner's times in Valencia testing the day after my ride, the GP8 that's been on track since March may very well have addressed that. Will 2008 be the start of a Ducati dynasty in MotoGP under the 800cc formula, like the Italian marque enjoyed in World Superbike for so long?