I am amazed at what makes some people tick.:Facepalm: Now this is a good looking and sounding bike. No, no, no, the 1098 series is still the best looking and sexiest bike on the planet.
Its a characteristic. Its not 'soul'. To suggest an inanimate object has 'soul', is to do 'life' a disservice. Its a machine. You may as well get turned on by a kettle.
Trumpet 675 Daytona is a cracking bike to ride. A 675R would be the only bike to drag me away from a Ducati
talking about accerleration my blade was all about 0 to 100 not top end pedigree it won a wsb title the Paniugly hasnt ,,and its not ugly ,,no comments about my daughter please !or her pink slippers
I think there is a lot of crap in this thread, and I don't agree with Boots' sentiment at all regarding the Panigale. If you look at race bikes, they only have one function, and that is to get around a track as quickly as possible. Racers aren't bothered about soul, if it means it's going to cost them seconds or 10ths. They probably don't really care if the bike is pig-ugly, just so long at it wins them races. For road users, it clearly isn't about this: it can't be. Most rides out are completely pointless; you don't actually have to go anywhere, you could just stay at home, so the idea that going nowhere as fast as you can and faster than anyone else is obviously a ridiculous criterion. Indeed, there were many fine bikes that didn't even race - the earlier Fireblades were one such example, the Triumph 955i another. Soul and character are what the riding experience is like, and that is a combination of many things. (Incidentally, the idea that character is just unreliability is tosh.) It's a mix of performance, sound, looks, feel and all sorts of unquantifiable things that produce a riding and ownership experience that works for any one individual. Now for Boots, the fact that the Panigale is not currently a successful race bike might be part of that mix. It might even be a very big part as far as he is concerned and you have to respect that. But to judge the Panigale purely on a price/race win ratio just seems ridiculous. So the argument that many Japanese bikes give you more performance per £ than a Ducati doesn't really wash. They probably do, and if in the basket of things that go to make up the riding experience performance is your over-riding consideration, then fine. In any case, race wins are also artificial. The rules might not be fair, and there are plenty of people who would argue that they weren't, when Ducati won many of their Superbike titles. Honda even had to develop a V-Twin to try to match them, as the rules were so biased in favour of that capacity/format. It depends on what riding you do too. A ZZR1400 might make perfect sense for crossing France (it probably does) but is pointless for pottering about Bracknell. I personally think that the latest incarnation of the Fireblade looks rubbish. The paint is all wrong for a start. On the other hand, the latest CBR600 looks great. Put them both side by side and it seems obvious that it is the prettier bike. And I don't enjoy the whizzy, electric feel to many IL4s, no matter how fast they are. When you think about it, you only go fast for the feeling it procures, not because you are in a major hurry, so if you don't get much feeling going fast why would you bother, especially with the attendant risks to your licence? Ducatis simply deliver on feel. If you don't think they do, I have no real idea why you are a Ducati owner, let alone a member of this forum. Not that I don't appreciate you, just that I can't see the point in being engaged with a brand which you think makes shoddy expensive goods that the competition does so much better.
In the Ducati Museum of great ducati's theres a hole where the panigale should be. Thats not an opinion. Ducatis racing pedigree is what gives them their Kudos. It wasn't their road bikes. It was their racing bikes. The Pani is meant to be a race bike so it should live up to the standards set by its predecessors. It falls short. When it steps up and does a job, great. Until then... What is the definition of soul? It is the essence of a living thing. A machine is a machine. Otherwise you may as well give them the vote. But for some I guess an inflatable doll can form the basis of a relationship. Its all moot anyway. Its all subjective. I quite like the new Blade SP.
This is rubbish. For Bracknell, you want the fastest thing going. The flaming Starship Enterprise, if you can't find anything faster - whatever you can get that will get you the fuck out of Bracknell.
Kwakers make mingers. Made nothing sexy since Z900. Although an old green Z11R ...[/QUOTE] My Z1 is my favourite of all my bikes and definitely the one I would never part with. In fact it's my favourite bike period, probably due to the hours I languished upon it. It's very much my personal statement of what a Z1 should look like. The anorak brigade will probably hate it, but it's how I think a Z1 should look and it goes soooo well: like a 4 stroke with a 2 stroke kick on steroids. It's an 1197cc Old School Turbo with an 'estimated only' 185bhp running 10 PSI boost - based on a similar spec engine that was run on a Dyno. Handling is surprisingly stable too. Perhaps my KR1000 project will run it close when finished though.
