Multistrada 1200S 4/4: Faults, Foibles & Thoughts

Categories: Bikes Reviews

Nothing's perfect and any new product is going to have its share of things that either need fixing for existing customers or improving for future versions – the test for the manufacturer being how openly and clearly they respond to problems. The Multistrada is no exception here, so herewith my nags and niggles for Ducati:

• The Pannier Lids: While the panniers are well designed for the most part (particularly the handles and locks), it's mildly annoying that the cutout for the exhaust in the right pannier prevents it from taking a full-face lid (something fixed by the optional wider lids). What's a lot more annoying is that the lids themselves are, frankly, pants: there's a 3-4mm gap twixt lid and body at the front, into which the rain does pour. Not good, but Ducati have acknowledged the problem and claim to be working on a fix.
• The Centre Stand. Presumably in an attempt to provide the maximum leverage for getting a fully-laden 'Strada onto the stand, Ducati have made the stand's arm far too long: it fouls the rider's left foot and pushes the stand down, causing it to ground out far too early. And, if you're like me and ride with the balls of your feet on the pegs, as the pace rises and you put more weight on your feet, the stand gets pushed down further and grounds out more readily the faster you go. Not a good combination. Again, an acknowledged problem and we're waiting for a fix.
• The Termignoni Carbon Slip-On Exhaust (official Ducati accessory): The heat shield for this bulges out so much that it's impossible to place your right foot properly on the footrest. It also fouls the centrestand spring, pushing the stand down and causing it to bounce against the bike when riding. Ducati have already issued a redesigned replacement heat shield and I'm just waiting for mine to arrive.
• Low-rpm surging: I've mentioned this above and some bikes seem to suffer more than others. I've not been particularly plagued by this, but there is a new software map to install, so at least some attempt has been made to address this.
• Pillion Position: this gives me an occasional speed-related pain in the kidneys. Nothing to do with the comfort but with the fact that the step up to the passenger perch means that my beloved can easily see the speedo. Ignorance used to be bliss…

And that's about it: the encouraging thing being that all real problems have been acknowledged by Ducati, so we'll wait and see what they actually do about it. There are a couple of other warranty tweaks to be done, but nothing that's affecting the use or ability of the machine.

Continue reading "Multistrada 1200S 4/4: Faults, Foibles & Thoughts"

Multistrada 1200S 3/4: The Alternatives

Categories: Bikes Reviews

Comparisons may well be odious but I'm not about to let that stop me: as I've ridden recent examples of some of the bikes with whose market footprints the Multistrada overlaps, here goes with a few highly personal observations, starting with the much-loved R1200GS. And here there's one thing to get absolutely clear: if you want real off-road ability, buy a GS (1200 or 800) or a KTM with their larger front wheels – the Multistrada with its 17" front wheel and more road-biased tyres is not a serious off-road machine. That said, it does fine in Enduro mode on forestry tracks, but then most things do, as those of us who followed, sheep-like, a club mate’s GPS down a French mountain bike track a few years ago discovered.

There's also been a lot of speculation online about the cost of even a trivial off-road drop on the Ducati – whereas a GS will simply land on its cylinder heads (most of the time), the Ducati will go right down on its side unless the panniers are attached. So, In my unending quest to bring enlightenment and knowledge to the world, I have taken one more tiny step towards Zen mastery, Grasshopper, and can confirm that it is in fact possible to drop the Multistrada off-road and suffer precisely no damage: Turning around on a local forest track, I ran out of steering lock (which is in fact very good) and decided to hop off to back 'er up, only to discover that, being in Enduro mode, the ground was further away than I thought. A lot further away – the bike went past its balance point, at which point whether or not it's 20kg lighter than a GS became entirely moot – it's a big, tall bike, and it was gone. Having convinced a couple of passing deer that very bad-tempered bears had been reintroduced to the Highlands, I hauled it back upright. Not a single, solitary scratch, scrape or ding. Relieved, impressed and relieved, in that order.

Continue reading "Multistrada 1200S 3/4: The Alternatives"

Multistrada 1200S 2/4: What's It All About?

Categories: Bikes Reviews

Firstly, and for anyone who hasn't come out of hibernation in the year to date, here's the what of the new Multistrada, which shares only its name with the previous model. This is a machine with longer wheelbase (in fact about 25mm longer than the R1200GS), long-travel suspension, two comfy seats, an adjustable screen, built-in pannier mounts and dual-purpose tyres. Sounds like a GS then, doesn't it? But wait, these are Italians we're talking about: Ducati's brief to their espresso and adrenaline-crazed design team was very simple: "Build the bike you'd want to ride on the road". They evidently took that to heart so here we have a machine which in its 'S' incarnation has:

• 142 real horsepower delivered at the rear wheel (according to Bike magazine's dyno – on which the latest GS has just under 100). More to the point, in taking 20bhp off the top-end of the 1198's engine, they've stuck it all back on at the bottom end and mid-range – below 6750rpm, the 'Strada makes way more power than an 1198, which itself isn't notably short of low-end grunt. For perspective, a 2010 Honda Fireblade puts out roughly 75bhp at 6000rpm. At the same revs, the Multistrada is punting out about 90bhp. Sure, the 'Blade has another 20+bhp at the top-end, but the rider has to wind it up first. Meanwhile, the Multistrada is over the hills and far away…
• An all-up weight around 225kg – about 20kg less than a GS, about the same as a VFR800 and just under 20kg more than the current generation of litre-class sports bikes.
• Multiple choices of engine map: full power delivered as fast as you can twist the throttle (wherein it does exactly what it says on the tin), a more relaxed delivery of the same power for touring (especially good for avoiding Nodding Dog syndrome two-up) and a very laid-back 100bhp mode for urban and off-road use.
• Electronically adjustable suspension for everything bar front preload, with four different modes available, each with four sub-modes (labelled solo, solo+luggage, two-up and two-up+luggage), giving a grand total of sixteen suspension modes, all controlled from a handlebar button by an idiot.
• ABS, naturally.
• Traction control, with eight different levels of intervention.

More to the point, all of these bar the ABS are integrated, so that when you switch modes, all adjust at once. And all are completely customisable: you can change settings and assign new settings to any mode or sub-mode. There is also (thankfully) a "Numpty" button to take everything back to stock settings once you've terminally confused both yourself and the bike. Oh, and you can switch modes whilst riding –€“ something I was a tad dubious about ahead of time, but it does prove to be a real boon on the road –€“ I can leave Edinburgh, hack across the wet city cobbles in Urban mode (low power, soft suspension and traction control ready to pounce), flip into Touring mode on the motorway (high but relaxed power and firmer but lightly damped suspension to cope with those tedious motorway miles), chop into Sports mode when I peel off onto the glory of my local Highland roads –€“ despatching most visiting sports bikes in the process – and, finally, drop into Enduro mode for the last three miles of broken single track into our village and the near-mile of motocross track that masquerades as our drive. Works for me and the modes really do make a difference to the feel and usability of the bike in each situation.

Continue reading "Multistrada 1200S 2/4: What's It All About?"

Multistrada 1200S 1/4: Brave New World

Categories: Bikes Reviews

Buying a motorcycle used to be so easy: Thirty years ago, if you wanted to tour, you bought a BMW; if you wanted to go fast in a straight line then eat hedge, you bought a Honda and, if you wanted to forget about the straight line bit and go directly to hedge, you bought a Kawasaki. If however you wanted to actually go round corners and, in the process, develop the mystical thousand-yard-stare of someone who doesn't know whence the money for the next service is coming, you bought a Ducati. Simples.

But how the world does change: it's 2010 and we're in a new age of motorcycling (crystals and tepees optional), where bikes compete on techno overkill, on race-derived kudos and in niches within niches ("Sir is looking for a V8 two-stroke motocross scooter, with built-in penguin catcher? In pink? – Step this way…"). So it takes a brave manufacturer to launch a machine that seeks to create a niche for itself by filling many niches –€“ aiming to be, if not all things to all riders, then at least many things to most of us. Which is exactly what Ducati has done with their new Multistrada 1200, the machine with which they're pitching – in part – for a share of the lucrative adventure tourer or 'tall-rounder' market, a market created and dominated by BMW (latterly aided and abetted by a couple of under-employed actors) with their GS series. It's also a market segment that's growing rapidly and is, in the process, squeezing the 'traditional' sports tourer market where Ducati's now-defunct ST range sat. Their own previous offering in the adventure bike market was the original Multistrada, the tall-rounder they launched in 2003, using Ducati's venerable 4v air-cooled DesmoDue engine rather than the superbike-derived Testastretta power plant. Very much a 'Marmite' machine, it's a complete hoot to ride but does lack the ultimate power and space for most peoples' idea of sporty touring.

Continue reading "Multistrada 1200S 1/4: Brave New World"

Plus Ça Change (Tweaking Part II)

Categories: Bikes Diary Reviews Tech

I've had my Multistrada for just over a month now – time enough to find out the good, the bad and the incomprehensible about it. And yes, it IS as good as the reviews say it is (my own full review has been much-delayed by the simple fact that I've been out riding it!) but it ain't entirely perfect, so here's my thoughts to date on what can be improved in future and what needs to be fixed by Ducati right now. It's a very short list, considering that this is a brand new bike designed to appeal to a much wider market than Ducatis of yore – and, by definition, a market less accommodating of Italian, ah, idiosyncrasies. But here they are, in all their ignominy – let's see what Ducati come back with:

Continue reading "Plus Ça Change (Tweaking Part II)"

Tweaking (Part I)

Categories: Bikes Reviews Tech

Whilst my natural inclination with a new bike is to start fiddling with its setup pretty much on the way out of the dealers, with The Raven I've been giving myself time to slowly get used to it, to play with the various suspension modes and generally suss it out until I understand it enough to start prodding at it. That does however assume that Ducati have pretty much got everything right to the point where, whilst I might want to tweak to taste, there's nothing I can't live with. So time to look at the figures.

The graphs below show the electronically adjustable bits of the system and the stock settings for each mode and load (for the Preload settings, the higher the number the greater the preload and, for damping, the higher the number the 'lower' the damping effect). Whilst there's a mostly logical progression - increasing rear preload and commensurate increases, particularly to rebound damping as the load rises, there are a few anomalies in various modes that I'm still trying to work out. Also, rear damping is jumped right up in Two-Up+load in Sport mode - a bigger difference between any other mode and we're finding that Touring mode is generally a little undersprung and damped and Sport mode slightly overdamped. I've a feeling that the rear shock might need respringing - I probably weigh a tad more than the target Italian norm...

Continue reading "Tweaking (Part I)"

Gravity 1: Multistrada 0.

Categories: Bikes Reviews

In my unending quest to bring enlightenment and knowledge to the world of the Ducatisti, I have taken one more tiny step towards Zen mastery (which must now put me on about the level of the average grasshopper) - this time to answer the speculation on various online fora about the potential cost of an off-road drop of the Multistrada 1200. Here's the answer: zip. nada. nowt. bugger all. OK, that's on a sample size of one: your mileage may vary. Turning around on a local fire road, I ran out of steering lock and decided to hop off to back 'er up, only to discover that the ground was further away than I thought. A lot further away - I'm 6', with 34" inside leg, but it still went past its balance point, at which point, whether or not it's 20kg lighter than a GS became entirely moot - it's a big, tall bike, and it was gone. Having convinced a couple of passing deer that very bad-tempered bears had been reintroduced to the Highlands, I hauled it back upright. Not a single, solitary scratch, scrape or ding. Relieved, impressed and relieved, in that order. Now off to put an ice pack on my knee...

"Honey, I Spent The Aga Budget…"

Categories: Bikes Diary Reviews

Time for a new toy. My old faithful STealth – my ST4s – has served me well for four years and it's a keeper, as a supremely capable all-round machine, so I'm looking for something more specific and more focussed for play on the local roads. Which is where the first of many dilemmas kicks in – which toy for which roads? Around here there are ballistically-fast, sweeping A-roads with sudden sections of tight twisties: that'll be a Ducati 1098S then. Then there are the smaller glen roads - rising and falling, twisting and turning back on themselves as they follow the edges of the lochs: much more Monster or KTM SuperDuke territory. Finally, there are bikes that seek the best compromise for all of these, plus my kilometre of potholed Belgium-on-a-bad-day drive: possibly a Multistrada 1100S - in fact if the Multistrada had the Testastretta engine, it would have been a shoo-in - I've ridden the earlier incarnation enough to know just how good a chassis they've got. But hang on, we're not talking about looking for an all-rounder here: we're looking for the maximum of engagement, hoot-inducing fun and the ability to get from A to B, usually via C to Z, with as much flair as possible and a decent tank range, given the distance between filling stations hereabouts. So I'm off to Ducati Glasgow to sample a selection of their range.

Continue reading ""Honey, I Spent The Aga Budget…""

Safety Last

Categories: Rants Reviews

My mother doesn't change her car very often: her last change was in 1991, from a thirteen-year-old Fiat 128 to her still-current, Zen-basic, 1-litre Peugeot 205. So basic in fact, that it doesn't even possess a clock, let alone advanced toys like a radio. The upside of this is that it represents motoring at its most focussed and basic, with nothing to distract you from the act of driving – and with such skinny tyres, you can have huge fun at very low and genuinely legal speeds. The late James Hunt used to drive an old Austin A30 van for exactly the same reasons. The Pug also possesses supremely good all-round visibility from narrow pillars and a low waistline. Its absolutely direct handling is a delight and the only downside is its criminally heavy steering, making three-point turns an exercise in forearm-pumping and giving my mother a seriously dangerous left hook. That little Peugeot is now fifteen years old and, despite its only having 25,000 miles on the clock, is starting to show signs of incipient decreptitude.

Continue reading "Safety Last"

Boxer Rebellion

Categories: Reviews

I like BMWs. Or rather, I've always tried to like BMWs – they plough their own furrow (sometimes literally) and are distinctive and different in appearance, ride and attitude, offering an intriguing alternative to the ubiquity of across-the-frame four-cylinder machines. My earliest vicarious experience with the marque was in the mid-seventies, with Bike magazine's breathless review of the rip-snorting R90S, which heavily implied that only those stout of both heart and sinew could be expected to master the mighty beast – quite a heady concept to an impressionable student who was just then coming to terms with the unbridled power of a newly-restored Royal Enfield 250. The fact that the R90S actually put out something like 60bhp on a good day was neither here nor there – it was the shock and awe that counted.

In the early eighties, I occasionally knocked around on an R90/6 and on one of the first K100s to hit these shores ("What shores?" – "Mine's a gin & tonic, thank you…") – compared to my Pantah, it was like riding a fast-spin washing machine that was attached to the world by rubber bands. Slack rubber bands. Thankfully chassis and suspension have improved over the years and BMW, after a short-lived attempt to abandon the Boxer twin layout, still offer a range composed predominantly of the twins plus four-cylinder heavyweights. I've ridden several of the current generation of both and am generally of the opinion that there are some truly excellent chassis here, all however desperately in search of decent engines.

Continue reading "Boxer Rebellion"

Small and Perfectly Formed…

Categories: Reviews

Here's a thing: a non-Italian bike, sight of which had me screeching to a halt outside the dealer while going about my business of the day. I can't think of anything save the current R1 that's managed that before. So here's a teaser: My photoshoot of the very new, very shiny Triumph Daytona 675, in tasteful dark grey:

Click here for the Colour image gallery.
Click here for the Black & White image gallery.

All images are copyright © Richard Harris, 2006. And watch this space: There's a full road test on the Daytona 675 coming to this site, very soon indeed…

The First Day of Sprint

Categories: Reviews

Just a week ago, Winter was very much with us. It was snowing in my little corner of Surrey, and had been for a fortnight. I'd had flu, and life was very much about not going anywhere beyond the warm and inherently stable confines of a motor car. Then, come Thursday morning, Spring arrived with a burst of bright and glowing sunshine – outside, the sparrows were coughing their way through the first dawn chorus of the year and inside, the cats were darkly muttering their desire to get outside of those same sparrows. And, to round out the signs and portents for this first day of Spring, Haslemere Motorcycles had also arranged to hand me the keys to their very shiny, very new Triumph Sprint ST demonstrator, for a test ride, which was definitely worth getting up for.

Now you'll notice that was spelt T-r-i-u-m-p-h, not D-u-c-a-t-i. But if you've read other stuff on this site, you'll also know that, despite being a hardened Ducatista, I'm just generally in favour of excellence in the form of good and characterful motorcycles. And it's always been a toss-up for me between the V-twin and the in-line triple as the perfect engine format. That's an opinion that hasn't changed since my motorcycling adolescence of the 1970s and my formative exposure to two of the great biking icons of the day - the Ducati 900ss and the T160V Trident.

I've ridden most current Ducatis, and not a few of the Triumphs of the last several years, and been impressed with all of them. The difference however is that I can usually manage to look at a Ducati without wincing, which hasn't always been true of the Trumpets. Worthy and thoroughly competent motorcycles certainly, but frequently with all the stylistic finesse of a lard blancmange and occasional lapses of finish that would shame a Trabant.

First Impressions

That's all been changing in the last couple of years – Triumph appearing to have adopted the very un-British view that a bike that looks good as well as working well will, funnily enough, sell well. And the latest incarnation of that thinking is the new generation Sprint ST, Triumph's sports tourer and a direct competitor to my own ST4s. So here we have the Triumph, resplendent in electric blue paintwork and triple-themed lights, clocks and pipes: matching tie, handkerchief and socks. Parts in fact seem slightly and contrivedly over-designed, giving parts like the clocks the impression of cosmetic plastic rather than alloyed engineering.

Overall though, this bike looks great - it has a spare elegance of design and line, with an aggressive and very non-lardy rearward-rising stance and a remarkable overall slimness to the package – it looks, and feels, light and lithe.

Continue reading "The First Day of Sprint"

State of the Art…

Categories: Bikes Diary Rants Reviews Rides Riding Tech

Bear with me, will you? I've been running this blog and site since late 1998 and have finally gotten around to migrating it all into my Two Worlds vServer engine, a set-up based on Movable Type content management system plus lots of other bits and pieces, held together with various hackettes (sorry, "ubiquity integration modules) in perl and php. Anyway, most of the raw content is across, but I'm still writing a few scripts to handle images and attachments, hence the sudden lack of photos, incriminating or otherwise. This will be completed very soon, at which point whatever passes for normal service will be resumed.

Richard

The Marmite Machine

Categories: Reviews

Sometimes, just sometimes, there is no middle ground of opinion, no equivocation and no compromise possible for those times, places, events or objects which excite lust, disgust, incomprehension, inspiration or apoplexy – anything but apathy. As with Marmite (that's Vegemite to the antipodally-challenged) itself, you either love it or hate it, and, if you've enough confidence in your product, you can even make an advertising campaign out of it. To be a tad more specific, if you are a motorcyclist and have ever seen a Ducati Multistrada, you have an opinion. You will either consider it an abomination, to be consigned to the pit whence it came, preferably as the headstone of its designer, Pierre Terreblanche, or as a bold and unconstrained leap into the future of what a motorcycle should be.

Continue reading "The Marmite Machine"

999!

Categories: Reviews

There have already been more words written and opinions expressed on the Ducati 999 than on most machines of recent years – replacing something as iconic as the 916 design was never going to be less than contentious. Over the next few months we'll all no doubt be reading test reports and comparisons on the 999 until terminal boredom sets in. We'll see it being wheelied, stoppied, ridden knee down, elbow down and occasionally arse up, by road testers whose behaviour is entirely untempered by the need to pay for maintenance, tyres and damage. Good for them – we'll enjoy the vicarious carnage.

Me, I'm neither particularly fast nor painfully slow, moderately competent on a good day and prone to the occasional braindead moment – pretty much like most of us, then. So this is the everyman opinion, albeit concocted over the course of a single hour-and-a-bit's test ride. This test ride has been occasioned by the decision to change bikes – time to pension off the faithful 748 for something a little newer, perhaps a little quicker and possibly a little more comfortable – the old injuries are playing up.

So here are my very personal impressions of what is, in brief, dynamically the best motorcycle I have ever ridden; visually, one that I find to be something of a curate's egg and which I found ergonomically, er, perplexing. Of course, your mileage may vary…

Continue reading "999!"

Test Rides

Categories: Diary Reviews

Having decided that Pegasus in Reading were to be my chosen victims, time for them to put their money where their mouth was, before I'd do likewise. So it's a quick phone call – "Hi, remember me? - I'm the guy who got lost getting to you last week, turned up 2 minutes before you closed, parked on the pavement and kept you half an hour talking about Ducatis". And rather than simply put the phone down and emigrate, they came back with "sure, and you'd now like a test ride, right? No problem, what would you like to try?"

Back to the sensibility versus desire thing – I'm a returning biker after many years layoff, so surely best to start with something at the sensible and less intimidating end of the range – a Monster? 900 or 750ss? Nah – been there, done that - want a faired bike and my old Pantah had pretty much the same engine in the early eighties. So that leaves the semi-sensible – the ST4 sports tourer and, of course, the insane – those design icons of the hypersports world, the 748 and 916.

Now the ST4 has the 916 engine and the 748 has essentially the same chassis as the 916, so the obvious thing to do was to test ride the ST4 and the 748 and if I liked the engine of one and the chassis of the other, then the answer would be a 916. Easy – Logic 101. But would they do it? "No problem – come along Saturday, and we'll have PDI'd one of each for you to try". Erk - so not only was I going to have to risk making a complete fool of myself in public but was going to have to do so on brand new machines with precisely no miles on their clocks – falling off would be double plus ungood.

Continue reading "Test Rides"