This Duke was fitted with Termi cans and a free-flowing air filter. Its owner had ridden it on a trackday and didn’t like it very much; it felt snatchy to him as he’d just got off of a four-cylinder bike – time for an ECU remap…
We took some ignition out of the bottom end and then went through the full card, mapping the engine to the cans with baffles in, as nowhere will you get on track these days with noisy pipes. On a Ducati this is bad news and knocks 10bhp off… still, that’s the way it is. We then had the bike off the dyno and sorted the suspension – from our days campaigning this model we’ve got a shrewd idea of what works.
As a road bike they’re great, but on a track they turn in well but tend to run wide on exit; the rear suspension linkage is initially stiff then soft. Wind the gas on hard and the rear squats, unloading the forks and changing the steering geometry. They can also be awkward to pick up and over side-to-side, so raising the C of G overall really helps.