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Feb 8

Ducati’s Superleggera V4 is a Panigale on a diet and turned to 11 – CNET

Diet Comments Off on Ducati’s Superleggera V4 is a Panigale on a diet and turned to 11 – CNET

With a dry weight of 350 pounds and an engine that makes 234 horsepower, the Superleggera will likely accelerate with unbelievable violence.

There are a lot of words in Italian that sound good on their own, but when applied to a car or a motorcycle becomes completely magic. One such word is Superleggera, or super light. When it comes to motorcycles, in particular, Ducati has offered Superleggeras before, but they've always been wildly special and expensive bikes. Rare to see in the wild.

Well, they're doing another one, and this one promises to just as much of a near-mythical beast as the rest. But unlike its predecessors, this one comes with track time at Mugello and even a go on a MotoGP bike for a few buyers.

We'll wait until you wipe the drool off of your keyboard.

Now, as we said before, the Superleggera always comes with some unique stuff, but the Ducati Superleggera V4 ups the ante even further by being the only street-legal motorcycle with a carbon-fiber chassis, swingarm and wheels. All that carbon is good for a total weight savings of 14.77 pounds over the standard aluminum-framed Ducati V4.

On top of that, it's got all the wild canards, winglets, and dive planes of its racing cousins, and in racing kit (read: an uncorked exhaust system from Akrapovic) form makes 234 horsepower. In its more "tame" trim, it still pumps out 224 horsepower, and that's from an engine that's 105 cubic-centimeters smaller than the regular road-going V4 Panigale. Oh, by the way -- that engine? Yeah, it's also 6.17 pounds lighter than the regular V4's engine.

Ducati found a way to remove over six pounds from its 998-cc V4 engine and it's not like you'd call the regular V4 "portly."

Toss in the lightweight but likely velvety-smooth titanium Ohlins shock and forks, essentially skeletonized Brembo brakes and a lightweight exhaust, and this bike is just silly.

In total, all of Ducati's weight-saving trickery makes for a bike that tips the scales at just 350 pounds. For comparison, that works out to a power-to-weight ratio that would make most Lotuses weep. Unfortunately, this Ducati, like so many of its special editions, isn't meant for mere mortals. This is a barely-legal street bike that plays awfully convincingly at being a MotoGP bike.

Part of the buying experience for the Superleggera includes access to what Ducati calls the SBK Experience, which lets participants throw a leg over the World Superbike-spec Ducati Panigale V4 R at Mugello in Italy. Even crazier is that 30 of the 500 customers for the Superleggera will go a step further and get the MotoGP Experience, which will let them ride on-track on the Desmosedici GP20 with factory race team support.

Ducati isn't divulging just how much you can expect to pay for its newest track toy. Still, given that the last Superleggera retailed for around $90,000 and had half as many cylinders and less carbon, we can safely assume that it'll be somewhere in the neighborhood of "eye-watering." Ducati plans for deliveries of the bike to kick off in June of 2020 at the rate of around five bikes per day.

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Ducati's Superleggera V4 is a Panigale on a diet and turned to 11 - CNET

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