The Ducati Multistrada V4 has been making waves in the adventure-touring space since its debut last month, but for some unlucky owners, that fun is about to come to a stop.
This is because Ducati has found quality issues with the valve guides on some of the V4 Granturismo motors, which could lead to excessive wear and could cause the engine to lose power and ultimately fail at the head.
With a couple caveats, I would describe the track day business model as heavily commoditized. That is to say, there is little to differentiate the track day of one organization from the next, which leaves most riders buying track time based on location, schedule, and price.
If you don’t give it too much thought, this concept shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, what riders are really buying is time on the race track, the conditions of which are relatively outside the purview of the organization hosting the event. This makes a brutal business landscape, and it is not surprising to see the space making a race to the bottom.
Now to be fair, some organizations run a tighter ship than others; some track day groups offer more instruction than others (especially for novice riders); and there are track days that offer more perks (lunch, photos, celebrity riders, etc) than others, but all-in-all the product is the same: a few hours of cumulative time on a race track.
In my 15 years of track riding, the biggest differentiation I have found between track day groups is the culture (or lack thereof) an organization has been able to infuse into its program. But, this only moves the needle a minuscule amount, and it shows in the ever-increasingly competitive marketplace that is motorcycle track riding.