V4S Could Be MotoGP Ready
MotoGP is the pinnacle of speed in the motorcycle racing world. The bikes are big, produce a ton of power, and are ridden by some of the best riders that have ever graced the racing series. Ducati is heavily involved in MotoGP with their Factory racing team, and to shake things up they decided to hold a test day at Jerez Circuit in Spain and bust out their street-legal 2021 V4S for their riders to enjoy.
MotoGP bikes are far from street legal. If you put a MotoGP bike next to a production street bike, the similarities are quite literally nowhere to be found. Honda spends anywhere from 1-2 million dollars to build their MotoGP bike, so from that alone, you can see that MotoGP is an entirely different breed of racing bikes.
Jack Miller, Johann Zarco, Ena Bastianini, Pecco Bagnaia, and Luca Marina each got their respective turns to take the street-legal production 2021 Ducati V4S around for some hot laps at Jerez. The Panigale managed to secure a best lap time of 1:43.3; which was only two seconds off of the 1:41.1 benchmark set by the Factory Ducati MotoGP bike.
“The Panigale are all stock bikes as you can buy on your local dealer, with additional accessories taken from the Ducati Performance accessory catalogue,”
“Most important are the racing exhaust and the raised footpegs kit. Some added a thumb rear brake. Then add talent and training!” said Ducati’s CEO, Claudio Domenicali.
Keep in mind that much like other teams, Ducati takes a lot of notes from their MotoGP seasons to further develop their production motorcycles; so perhaps the V4S isn’t so far from the MotoGP bike as we may have thought.
I would love to own a race detuned Ducati. Think of the engine reliability that would be built into the engine. I would like to see the peaky power band gone and the reliability stay. The rest has to be in the exhaust and suspension and the new owner can always use aftermarket.