This Ducati 1098S is owned by a regular customer of ours, and he bought it in recently for some work; he’d purchased a Cordona PQ8 quickshifter from us (for an old carb’d Yamaha R1) a while ago, and wanted it swapping onto his Ducati that he’s not long had.
This is a relatively straightforward job (and one of the beauties of Cordona, apart from how well the system actually works…) and all we needed to do is replace the four-cylinder loom with a twin-cylinder loom, as the quickshifter’s ECU and trigger are all the same. The new loom cost £50, so not bad!
He was also having problems with his bike’s steering – the usual 1098 ‘steers like a bus’ syndrome. We did a simple, and popular mod for him by raising the whole bike up, moving the centre of gravity up, which makes the bike feel lighter side to side. We didn’t tip it on its nose because this model in particular doesn’t respond well to this simple method of sharpening up the steering, but depend on how he gets on next year the next step will be to stiffen the rear suspension, as they do tend to squat under throttle.
His seals had gone in his forks too – the Ohlins road and track spec – and this was most likely due to doing 100s of miles strapped down hard in the back of a van…