As regards Ducati's street bikes - they've been getting by primarily on stylishness and exclusivity
and high-price/snob appeal for decades. The Ducatis of the '70s and 80's were really awful bikes
but the same breed of rider who would buy incredibly unreliable old Brit bikes because they had
that whole cult-appeal, regardless of their poor electronics and .... brakes - made Ducati a
viable company. It's only in the last 15 years or so that they've been really producing street
bikes that were truly head to head with the much cheaper Jap bikes. And they're still friggin'
unreliable as hell. It has been I think, a painful and expensive realization for the Ducati engineers
to arrive at, ie: they have to truly match the technological brilliance of the Japanese. Doing this
using Ducati's long-standing design philosophy has been a major fail all in all. Stoner was a
brilliant band-aid for a while - but now they need to get down to some real surgery.
Let us not sling mud on poor
Ducati.
The street Ducatis of the 60s and 70s were some of the best sport bikes you could buy
at the time.
Better brakes and better handling than the Jap bikes (very poor in those areas at the time,
and even extremely dangerous when ridden fast like the notorious Kawa 500 Mach III);
weak points of the Ducks were comfort (nonexistent) the poor electrics and the low
quality of the finish in general. The old 750 and 900 L-twins were good engines, but
you needed well-trained mechanics doing regular maintenance.
In the late 70s and 80s the Ducatis progressed in some areas but meanwhile the
Jap bikes fixed chassis and brakes issues and became better (and cheaper)
street bikes than the Ducatis. This is the period that has generated most of the
opinions that you are echoing.
In the 90s the best Ducatis were, again, better sport bikes than most of the
Japanese competition but were way too expensive, and needed more maintenance
than Japanese bikes.
The situation kept evolving in the last few years. In recent years Ducati have made
a quantum leap in reliability (new high-precision machinery has been installed
at the factory) and now their maintenance intervals are even better than those of the
Japanese bikes. Latest models like the new Multistrada are as reliable
as any BMW or Honda.
Speaking of
Ducati race bikes, they have always been extremely good in all the
stock-derived categories. No need to speak of that.
They entered prototype grand prix with the advent of
MotoGP and 4-stroke engines.
In two years, they were winning races against all the best Japanese bikes and
in 2006 they were already title contenders.
So the design philosophy wasn't that bad, was it.
In 2007 they won, big surprise, taking advantage also of new silly rules, of Bridgestone
tires they had helped in developing, and of the talent of
Casey Stoner.
In the following years, however, it became more and more evident that Ducati was
Stoner-dependent. It is in these last few years of the
800cc era that Ducati has
grown a reputation as a
peculiar and
difficult bike; note however that while the
800cc is certainly a difficult beast, the
990 wasn't considered so difficult -- so it's not the
fault of the design philosophy (that has not changed much from the 990), but it is
the 800cc model that was born problematic.
Overall, in GP,
Ducati can be considered third behind
Yamaha and
Honda, but in
front of
Suzuki (and late
Kawasaki). That are both representatives of the "Japanese brilliance".
So it's not really that bad after all.
Just for the sake of objectivity
