Here I am, after two decades of riding motorcycles, barely stifling a yawn at the thought of putting yet another bike through its paces, when this Italian grabs me by the collar and wrecks my mature, well settled, notions bred on refined engines and polite machines. On an early morning Mumbai street, I gingerly wheel a Ducati 848, the latest addition to the legendary Italian stable out of a hotel parking lot. The bike has been standing, covered and camouflaged in a basement and with good reason— pearl white, glinting in the sun, with the classic Ducati 916 pair of horizontal headlamps, twin exhausts emerging from under the pillion seat and a bare rear wheel, the 848 makes a grandstand entrance. To call it a looker is an understatement. The 848 doesn’t solicit attention, it commands it. And if you are in the saddle, then it better be undivided. At first sight it evokes the feeling of being smitten with a woman you know is going to get you into trouble—la belle dame sans merci. You know she will have a price, that you ought not to succumb, but you yield anyway.
Turn the key and the 849 cc L-twins (90 degree twin cylinders) roar to life. The throaty, uneven firing is unmistakably Ducati—the patent stainless steel mufflers (identical to ones on the bigger 1098) mean that this bike can be heard around the block, and usually before it gets there. It’s a hot sultry day in Mumbai, the traffic is moderate and the bike is an instant head turner. On the way to Versova, a red Porsche races past and then comes right back to check out the bike. The 848 has serious cool quotient. It may seem like I’m harping on the cosmetics but the 848’s sheer presence dwarfs other machines on the road. It can haul the mail, too—the powerplant has tremendous range and torque, which make it easy to ride.
Robert Pirsig puts it well in Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance —“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.” There is no dichotomy with the 848—simple and layered, sensuous and powerful, hard-nosed and nimble, street-legal and racetrack material. Obviously I am gushing a bit, but trying to be objective about the 848 is as hard as trying to resist opening its throttle on an open highway. The bike takes you back to the heart of motorcycling, where roads and machines have not shrunk for the allowance of freedom. That free range, which every biker knows is the way to the centre of things.
