Best of BOTH WORLDS

WE HAVE featured over the past six years countless custom café racers based on Ducati’s wonderful air-cooled belt-drive two-valve V-twins. These legendary desmo engines have torque and soul aplenty, yet are as cheap as they are plentiful. As the basis for a project, they tick a lot of boxes.

Even so, they weren’t even on Chris Wilson’s list when he got the itch to ditch his Triumph Sprint RS after a history of mechanical woes. “I was over it and had been looking to move onto a more reliable, sportier and more specialised mechanical steed for a while,” he says. “The problem was which of the multitudes on offer would I choose? Most new bikes looked