From a safe social distance, the baby Panigale doesn’t look like a baby at all, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a full-on fire-breathing, 200bhp superbike. It gets some serious points in the aesthetics department with its bold Ducati red, its stubby underslung exhaust and its single-sided swingarm; it’s unmistakably Italian and it’s likely to give Ducatisti the world over a raging stiffy.
And if the looks alone are only trick enough to muster a lazy one, then the sound of the 955cc L-Twin Superquadro engine is sure to have the blood rushing south to finish the job. The twin-cylinder boom is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear when I fire a Duke up, and it takes me back to the good old days before they started bolting an extra two cylinders on the back of things. All it needed was the rattle of a dry clutch and I’d have been 10 years old again, staring at my dad’s mate’s 916.
In recent years, middleweight Dukes have felt slightly peculiar to me; almost like naked bikes with some fairings slapped on them – high handlebars, low pegs, that kind of thing. Not the V2. As soon as you mount up, you’re treated to a sporty riding position on a bike that feels small and nimble, yet not too cramped. It was comfortable and I liked it.
I liked the dash too, which was a TFT jobby, like the one you’ll find on the flagship Panigale V4. The modes and settings are fairly easy to navigate through, even if the switchgear buttons are a bit naff and cheap looking. And the switchgear buttons continued to annoy me due to the fact that the ‘mode’ button is the indicator switch, so when you thumb the indicator switch just to double check your blinkers aren’t going, you end up getting all sorts of weird and wonderful messages from the dash. One to get used to.
Initial set-off on the V2 can be slightly jerky, but once you get rolling, the engine is pretty smooth. At the very bottom of the rev range, the Duke could get a bit chuggy, but from about 4000rpm onwards the torque doles itself out beautifully and progressively. It made it a very easy, forgiving bike to ride on the road, and whatever gear I was in, when I opened the taps, there was always adequate punch to make me go forward.
While the punch was adequate, it wasn’t mind-warpingly fast. Despite now being Euro5 compliant, this year’s bike has got more power and torque than the 959 that it replaces (thanks to new injectors and inlet ducts) and after reading of the bike’s claimed 155bhp, I was expecting something a little bit more manic – but manic it certainly wasn’t. Its performance on the dyno may go some way to explain why that was – the V2 made a measly 136bhp, underperforming compared with its claimed figure by a whopping 19bhp. Scandalous.