Ducati hosted the world launch of its new littler superbike – the Panigale V2 – near the scenic city of Seville in Spain. Donovan Fourie endured two flights worth of airline food to attend and ended up asking a lot of profound questions, particularly about Ducati’s sanity…
After a casual glance at the Vee Two spec sheet, you’d be forgiven for thinking Ducati has gone a little bonkers. The brand is obviously famous for its racing pedigree to such an exhaustive winning extent that the MotoGP Championship is mockingly known among fans as “The Ducati Cup”.
World Superbikes appears to be heading down a similar avenue.
Everything is about performance and pushing the very boundaries of what is possible technologically.
The current 2025 Panigale V4 is arguably topping the performance charts as far as street-legal super sports machines go. It chucks out 216hp, weighs about the same as a feather mattress and has enough electronic bits to make crashing one of these things near impossible.
That’s Ducati’s flagship pride-and-joy, however, trailing it in the showroom line-up has always been the littler Ducati superbike. It started with the 748 that had the drop-dead looks of the 916 but with a little less oomph both in a straight line and in the bank manager’s office.
More so, it lived up to its family name by winning the World Supersport Championship beating the legion of Japanese 600 fours.
As the flagship superbike evolved, so did the littler bike. The engineers worked hard to improve the 748 to a 749, then an 848 accompanied the 1098/1198 superbikes, an 899 Panigale joined the 1199 Panigale and the Panigale V2 joined the Panigale V4 in continuing the winning streaks.
Now for 2025, Ducati announced a brand new V2 that’s rebuilt from the ground up and following the tradition of performance and racing pedigree… You’d expect the new Vee Two to boast a 300hp, 5000cc engine that revs to 36,000rpm and with electronic sophistication to put SpaceX to shame.
Actually, no. They didn’t do that. They did sort of the opposite.
The previous Vee Two had 955cc of throbbing cylinders in the traditional 90º. For 2025, Ducati is offering a more subdued 890cc.
The horsepower has taken its toll too – the previous bike put out a laudable 155hp with 104Nm of torque. The replacement features a more pedestrian 120hp and 93Nm of torque.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s somewhat of a performance downgrade because you would be right.
But as is the way with everything from these large factories, featuring whole offices filled with people whose full-time job it is to think of stuff like this, Ducati isn’t simply being blatantly obtuse. It has a Plan.
To show off this Plan, Ducati rented the new Sevilla Circuit in the city of Seville, south of Spain. The newly laid tar stretches four kilometres long and was likely designed by someone with a heavy drinking problem. They negligently included far too many hills resulting in devious blind rises and somehow fitted 400 corners in this allotted distance. That’s how it felt, anyway.
Being new, it was a first-time for all of the world’s motorcycle elite (and The Bike Show), so the first session elicited a series of comments that can be summed up with “What the hell was that?”
It wasn’t until around session three that people started coming to terms with this massive perplexing and physically laborious circuit. It’s the sort of place where one little wrong move and you’ll be picking kitty litter out of various oroffices for weeks. A big, bad litre race bike would be near impossible to control under these circumstances, which is why Ducati wasn’t giving us a big, bad litre superbike.
According to the Bologna marketing gurus, there are more people looking for an easy-to-ride, fun superbike than a pure laptime blitzer. So the engineers took the Vee Two back to the drawing board and gave it some more manners.
The 955cc motor was remade to an 890cc 90º V-twin unit with the cylinders rotated 20º to make everything fit better. The downside of course was that a bunch of the horses had to leave the stable hence going from 155 to 120hp, and 104 to 93Nm.
In real life, the ring of V-twins drowning out the normally peaceful Seville was indeed as glorious as you imagine it. The Panigale V4 is an incredible machine but there’s something just right about the sound of a V-twin pouring out of a Ducati.
The speed is similar to that of a 600-four but somewhat easier. The fours have useable power somewhere between 15,500rpm and 15,501rpm so riding them involves an acrobat’s performance of gear change and keeping the speed up. In contrast, the Vee Two makes 70% of its 93Nm from just 3,000rpm. The Sevilla Circuit has a mixed concoction of sweeping curves and tighter hairpins and all but one corner on the circuit could be successfully navigated in third. It was easy.
The lower capacity also allowed Ducati to shed some kilos from the new motor – 9.5 of them, to be precise, making this the lightest V-twin motor Ducati has ever produced.
While they were at it, Ducati went about shedding weight throughout the motorcycle, particularly in the new aluminium chassis and the new Y-spoke wheels. In total, the Vee Two has saved the scales 17kg. That’s the same sort of weight as check-in luggage at the airport. Imagine strapping that to your back and going for a jog.
The total wet weight without fuel is 175kg which is jolly good.
The Vee Two keeps the Panigale design policy of making the motor a large part of the frame therefore saving Ducati from having to build a lot of frame. The new front sub-frame is aluminium as is the new double-sided swing-arm that uses the same lateral arm principle as the new V4.
Suspension on the S-models that we were riding is taken care of by Ohlins and the success of the Ducati/Ohlins combination is already well-documented.
Sevilla Circuit is tough and offers stacks of opportunities to get things horribly wrong. I suspect that on more demanding motorcycles, including Ducati’s own V4, we might have seen many a gravel pit tragedy throughout the launch – dare I say that my rusty form on the day suggests I’d have been one of them – and yet no, there were no ambulance flashes.
This is down to the forgiving nature of the Vee Two, not just from the friendlier motor but also from a chassis that is nothing more than compliant. Even when the confusing turns are completely misjudged, the bike will hold its own and subdue any panic surging through the rider’s maddened eyes. It’s light to turn but crucially effortlessly stable – a rare but fortuitous combination. Not only does it comply with the rider’s wishes but it does so without leaving your body completely bereft of energy.
More so, it is roomy enough for even the larger journalists with surnames like Fourie to be able to move around without restriction, the footpads are low enough for your feet to reach without the need to dislocate your knees and the bars may be crouched in a racing style but not to crippling levels. We didn’t get a chance to ride on the public roads but we suspect that this bike would handle itself fine there.
Electronics are all present and accounted for, including turning ABS, launch control, pit lane limiter, lap timer with coloured segments and every acronym you can conceive, all dutifully controlled via a snazzy new TFT dash.
The front brake callipers are from Brembo but the middle-shelf M50 versions instead of the latest goods. A pro racer chasing lap times might notice this minor lapse. You and I won’t.
So what we have here is what Ducati promised – a fun, easier superbike for people more interested in the pure joy of riding. Whether that will tickle a big enough chunk of the South African audience is left to be seen, but I’d never forgive my fellow Saffers if they didn’t at least give the Vee Two consideration.
Most of them will probably benefit. This point was illustrated during Ducati’s morning presentation. During the testing phase, the team let a pro racer out on track with the older, more powerful Vee Two and then the new one. They then did the same thing with an experienced track day rider. The pro racer around whichever track this happened to be was understandably 0.22 sec slower on the new bike. The track day rider was amazingly more than half a second a lap faster. For some people, easier is better than more powerful.
Personally, I’m pleased we used this Vee Two on this circuit. I suspect I’d not only have been slower on the old bike but very likely paying off a mildly written-off Panigale. I only just finished paying off my school fees from crashing the last one.
The new 2025 Ducati Panigale V2 is expected to grace South African shores in May. The base model will set you back R300,000 and the V2S is expected at R330,000. That’s a lot of dosh, but we say that about all bikes these days…
