THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING

When Ducati management stood up and proclaimed that the new Panigale V-4 was the “closest bike in the segment to a MotoGP machine,” there were probably a few sets of eyes rolling around the room. This is common rhetoric from Ducati—to lean on racing lineage and how it resides in the passion the company delivers to the public. It taps into our basic, adolescent instincts about motorcycles: the more power, the bigger the brakes, the louder the exhaust, the better. I know the feeling well. I was a child once.

What I learned about Ducati’s hunger for racing, however, by slinging my inner child around the Circuit Ricardo Tormo near Valencia, Spain, was not what I was expecting. It wasn’t about passion at all, or history, or trophies. Ducati found a way to transmit a new kind of performance in its superbike. A new flavor of strength that I think was developed on the world stage and isn’t in any