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Ducati 1199 Superleggera

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Yesterday we brought you an interesting Photoshop mashup, where Ducati 851 Superbike fairings were CGI’d onto a Panigale chassis (it was a 1199 Superleggera, to be precise), with drool-worthy result.

That lead to the guys at OTTO Revista pinging us, to show their work, which includes the bodywork from the venerable Ducati 916, photoshopped onto the Ducati 1299 Superleggera, Borgo Panigale’s latest and greatest.

Taking from arguably the most beautiful Ducati ever produced, and adding to it the most technologically advanced Ducati street bike ever concieved, well…the result (above) speaks for itself.

Just for kicks too, there is a Supermono mashup, as well as a TT2 (Pantah) version, after the jump.

If you are a regular reader of Asphalt & Rubber, or listen to the Two Enthusiasts Podcast, you have probably heard our musings on where the next big design trend is coming, and know our affinity for the rise of bikes from the 1980s and 1990s.

So, with the being said, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we are intrigued by the following piece of photoshoppery, which smashes together two Ducati superbikes, the 851 and the Panigale.

At first you wouldn’t think that the two designs would work together, but the more we look at this, the more we are intrigued to see one in the flesh.

Ducati North America is recalling the Ducati 1199 Superleggera for an issue in its clutch assembly. The recall affects all 168 units that were sold in the USA – bikes manufactured between April 8th, 2014 and November 13th, 2014.

According to Ducati North America’s filing with NHTSA, the damper plate assembled between the primary driven gear and the clutch basket assembly could break due to fatigue.

With the Honda RC213V-S debuting at Catalunya last week, much has already been said about Big Red’s road-going GP bike…especially in terms of how it compares to other halo bike motorcycles that have been 0r currently are on the market.

So, in the interest of exploring solely the most basic attributes from a motorcycle’s technical specification sheet, we have compiled a spreadsheet to see how the Honda RC213V-S stacks up against its most analogous street bikes.

As such, we have compiled the horsepower, dry weight, and cost of the the Ducati Desmosedici RR, Ducati 1199 Superleggera, Kawasaki Ninja H2R, MV Agusta F4 RC, EBR 1190RS, and Yamaha YZF-R1 motorcycles — you can see the easy-to-read chart (after the jump), and make your own comparisons to the RC213V-S.

For 2014, Ducati is giving the Panigale a bit of a model update, and thanks to an ill-framed photo from the Ducati North America dealers’ meeting, we know that the new superbike will be called by the 1299 designation.

The upgrade in number caused some confusion though, as Ducati has a mixed history of matching designation numbers to actual displacement sizes. Hoping to clear up the confusion and speculation, we received some details from our Bothan spy network.

Whoa, hold on…don’t worry, you’re still at the right site. Yes this is a car, and yes this is a site dedicated to motorcycles, but it will all make sense in a minute…or however long it takes you to read the headline of this story. Don’t worry…scroll up…we’ll wait.

Anyways, one of the perks for Audi AG’s acquisition of Ducati is that parent company Volkswagen can play around with interesting concepts that involve the compact, yet powerful, engines that come out of Borgo Panigale. One of those flights of fancy has manifested itself into a real-life concept, the Volkswagen XL Sport.

UPDATE: The Superleggera has been taken off the market.

Did you miss your chance to get a Ducati 1199 Superleggera? Were you not one of the chosen few Ducatisti who were whisked away to Bologna, wined and dined on carbon fiber, titanium, and magnesium? Did you just not have $65,000 last year to plunk down on Bologna’s ultimate superbike?

Have no fear, despite the Superleggera basically selling out before it was even publicly debuted, there is hope for collectors and enthusiasts to own this magnificient machine…but it’s going to cost you.

Available on eBay is a 0 miles, straight-from-the-crate brand new, corse-painted Superleggera (#123 of 500). The catch? It’s being offered for a cool $85,000 — $20k over MSRP.

The Ducati 1199 Superleggera is finally here, Ducati’s exclusive 500 customers are starting to receive their bikes, and Ducatista around the world are acting like its Christmas in May. We can’t blame them; after all, the Superleggera is a rolling showcase of what the engineers at Borgo Panigale can do with a street-legal machine.

Our friends at Moto Corsa were lucky enough to get three fine specimens in the first wave of deliveries — the Portland, Oregon shop will receive nine Superleggeras in total — a pretty sizable sum when you consider that less than 200 will make their way across the pond to US soil.

Naturally Arun and his cohorts took the opportunity to examine up-close what $200,000 worth of carbon fiber, titanium, and aluminum looks like. Even better, they documented the experience, for our viewing pleasure of course.

If you were one of the early birds to put a deposit down on the Ducati 1199 Superleggera, chances are that your $60,000 worth of titanium and magnesium, dripping in carbon fiber we might add, is sitting at your local Ducati dealer right this very second. We don’t know how you’re maintaining your composure under these circumstances…just breathe.

And soon, we all will be reading all about the Superleggera’s stellar attributes, as the chosen few of motorcycling’s journalistic ranks are headed to Mugello to put Claudio Domenicali’s homage to engineering through its paces. That’s not in our cards just yet, so we will have to keep ourselves warm at night with some cold hard numbers. Dyno graph numbers.

The good folks at RSRacecraft have stuck a Ducati 1199 Superleggera on the shop’s Dynojet 250i chassis dyno, breaking in a Moto Corsa customer’s machine at their request, and the impressive results are above.