.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
.
I may be as thick as a whale omelette, but even I have heard the rumblings about the new Ducati Diavel. Super performant, as is Ducati’s thing, but with the soul of a cruiser, and style bleeding all over the place; Ducati traditionalists are pissed, but folks like me are awfully curious. So, when pal Jimmy from Ace Motorsports suggested I might give the new beast a three-day test drive, I jumped. Might as well ;)
My current ride is a Triumph cruiser. Man, I love those British lines! I have never understood the attraction to those other tacky, exoskeletal racing constructs with their multicolored scaffolding and exhaust pipes proudly tipped up into my face like pairs of preening cat-butts.
Alone, photos of the Diavel did little to convince me, but… It turns out the Diavel is WAY sexier in person than any picture I’ve seen. Dunno why that is, but DAMN. And this thing turns heads: just two blocks out of the gate I had already attracted crazy smiling thumbs-ups from Harley riders and cops alike; two more blocks and I stopped for a taco (sue me, I was hungry) and before I could say “chimichanga” I was accosted by two teenagers demanding to know what on earth I was riding.
Over the next three days, the Diavel transformed my perceptions of what a bike could be, what riding could be, and why I really must go to Italy one day…
We all learn early on to “lean into the curve,” and I have always thought I was doing just that, but no – clearly I have not:
I’ve been sitting on top of the curve, leaning at it. Not my fault, it’s all my bike will allow.
On the Diavel, the bike wants you at the apex of that curve, right where the action happens, where science blinds the road. The windier, steeper, faster, the better, just lean the hell in, the more in you are, the more perfect it feels. Like Slim Pickens on the bomb in Dr. Strangelove. A revelation, really, and one that is hard to come back from: on my own bike now I am very aware that I am managing the situation to a large degree; the Diavel simply knows what to do.
I have never really known what the phrase “Eat My Dust” meant until riding the Diavel.
Imagine this: idling at a red light with a bunch of other vehicles; green light throttle GO, now look in your rear view and there is NOBODY THERE. If those poor bastards had blinked they would have thought you had simply disappeared.
That same game can be played from almost any starting speed: Already doing a hundred? Want to get away quick? Done and done.
.
.
Some brief feature-geekery: The Ducati people have, wisely, included three riding modes, easily switchable on the fly: Urban, Touring, and Sport.
Urban will place some intelligent limits on various processes in the system, keeping power at a “modest” 100+HP. Touring and Sport modes are a low and high performance configuration of 162 HP, respectively.
Riding in Urban mode was sane and safe in town; Touring mode was a thrill ride for sure, and Sport mode could more precisely be called Weapon mode, and should likely be registered with the authorities as such. I tried Weapon mode for long enough to scare myself silly, and spent the rest of my time back in Touring mode (the middle one), which had more headroom than I could ever imagine needing; I never found the end of it.
.
.
Pros
Pretty much everything. The Diavel perfectly suited my six-foot frame, and after only ten minutes it felt as if I’d been riding it all my life. The seat is comfortable and the posture is phenomenally back-friendly (another revelatory experience, to do a daylong ride and come home without an aching spine !). Need to at least mention here that the Ducati attention to fit and finish is way over the top. Down to details like the key fob, the gas cap, the footpegs, there seems to be nothing too small to get love and attention from Ducati design, engineering and production. At around 450 pounds, nimble and light but still substantial, the weight is pretty near perfect.
Cons
Pretty much nothing. However, I did find myself pushing the Diavel a bit harder each time I fired it up, just out of curiosity. The bike never broke a sweat, and I am pretty sure that the real world would eventually say WHOA before the bike ever would. A couple of riders I know, who clearly revere the Ducati line, told me flatly that they would not allow themselves to even get on one, Diavel or not, for that very reason. That issue is not enough to keep *me* off the bike, but I feel like I have to identify at least one con here :)
.
.
Epilogue
Do you remember the story, “Flowers For Algernon“? In it, a man of challenged mental capacity by the name of Charly was given a radical new medical procedure that rapidly tripled his intelligence, moving him well past everyone around him. The pathos-packed punchline was that the procedure turned out to be only temporary: after experiencing such thrilling acceleration of intellect, he subsequently had to endure the concomitant dumbing down, sinking again, hour by hour, back to the doldrums where he began.
Like Charly, I had been given a gift of thrilling acceleration, and my gift, too, was cruelly short-lived: I returned the Diavel to Jimmy, and rode home on my once-beloved Triumph Speedhamster, sadly certain that my own ride was fat, ugly, and stoopid.
Still, there may be some comfort. Like Charly, once I finally move through this second phase, I should eventually reach a point where I forget what it was ever like to go so fast, to be so connected to the bike and the road, to be so much BETTER THAN YOU. I may be getting there, it’s hard to say; I sure hope so.
For now, though, I can still recall, all too clearly, leaving everyone to eat my dust, leaning into to the tip of the warhead, pointing it straight down, and going, going, GONE.
.
.
