This Ducati Panigale is owned by Nick, a regular customer of ours who we’ve seen for many years; when he arrived with it our collective draws dropped… “What are you doing on this…?” Was our question. “You’ve had all manner of big sports Suzukis, all the good stuff, and now you’ve gone over to the dark side big time!”
He admitted to being in love with it and described it as “A monster!”. A sentiment we whole heartily agreed with. We’ve booked it in for an ECU remap and are taking our time with it – the initial runs have been to switch off all the emissions interference.
The weather’s been poor (and we don’t want to ride it in all the salt and wet debris) so that’s holding it up a bit, so a sunny day and dry roads are important, not least coz with well over 190bhp at the rear wheel we’re more than a little afraid! On one early test run the orange traction light was flashing (in a straight line) without pushing too hard and then all of a sudden a big yellow panel came up on the dash which we eventually figured out was a frost warning!
Clever stuff. It’s with us to make the power delivery more pleasant (much like the new R1 and ZX-10R). We want to make sure the maps we build for it are absolutely right and we’ve got the bike for as long as we need. There aren’t many people in the UK that have the system we have to plug into the Panigale’s ECU (or the know-how to use it) so we’ll let you know what we learn when we learn it…
