Ducati 998
Ducati 998
BEING A DUCATI FAN CAN SOMETIMES PROVE frustrating. You read in the magazines about the new 996R Superbike with its narrow-head Testastretta engine, but the articles don't mention price or availability. You watch Ben Bostrom win five straight World Superbike races, Ruben Xaus put in an awesome late-season charge and Troy Bayliss capture the rider’s championship, but the bikes in your local Ducati dealer’s show-room all have the old Desmoquattro motor. So you go to the company website (www.ducati.com) and discover that not only did the 500 996Rs built for the 2001 season sell out months earlier, they weren’t street-legal and cost a breathtaking $28,995. What’s a Ducatista to do?
The answer, as has often been the case, is to be patient. Because now, just one year after the Testastretta's debut, that engine is available to the general public. No fewer than three models are offered: the racing-only 998R, the limited-production 998S in Ben Bostrom and Troy Bayliss editions, and the subject of this test, the 998.
I was really looking forward to riding the 998, because in spite of being the resident Ducati owner on staff, I’d only ridden a 996R once. My buddy Paul Vitale let me take his AHRMA championship-winning racebike for a spin at last summer’s Ducati Owners Club of Canada Rally, and that 20-minute session was the desmo high point of my year! The quick-revving Testastretta engine let the slick-shod machine explode off comers and rip through the gears with the ferocity of a four-cylinder Superbike rather than a humble V-Twin. Granted, Paul's bike wasn’t stock, with a set of pipes and a different fuelinjection chip letting it chum out about 140 horsepower on race gas, but that’s all I had to go on.
Until last November, when Ducati North America (“DNA” to the in crowd) held a press introduction for the 2002-model 998 at Southern California’s Buttonwillow Raceway Park. For me, they couldn’t have chosen a better venue: Buttonwillow is home to Club Desmo, our local Ducati association, and as a riding instructor at the club’s track days, I’ve literally logged more than a thousand laps there. Even better, Ducati promised to have a couple of last year’s 996s on hand for direct comparisons.
The night before our track test, a technical presentation was held in conjunction with dinner at a local rib joint. There, Gennaro Cugnetto, Ducati’s engine testing department manager, explained the inner workings of the Testastretta engine. Having had Ingegnere Massimo Bordi go over the redone desmo with me one-on-one at the factory (“996R,” CW, November, 2000), I frankly wasn’t expecting to learn much. But to my surprise, there have been a number of developments.
First, while one of the 996R’s principal advances was more oversquare cylinder dimensions (100 x 63.5mm for 998cc versus the 996’s 98 x 66mm), the new 998R is even more oversquare ( 104 x 58.8mm for 999cc). The 998 and 998S retain the 996R’s dimensions.
Second, where the 996R had a deep, V-shaped oil sump, only the 998R is so-equipped; the 998 and 998S make do with a traditional, 996-style high sump. The reason given is that only racebikes are routinely subjected to the abrupt speed and directional changes that can cause oil to slosh away from the pickup; the deep sump prevents that from happening.
In all other respects, the 998 and 998S were built to 996R spec, with the new narrow-angle cylinder heads, revised desmodromic valve actuation, plain-bearing cams, investment-cast steel sparkplug tubes and 54mm (up from the 996’s 50mm) throttle bodies with showerhead single injectors.
Bordi had told me that there was a new ECU for the enginemanagement system, and at the intro we got to see the difference firsthand. The old Magnetti Marelli model 1.6 ECU was a large, relatively heavy unit, and its 8-bit/16-Mhz microprocessor allowed for 16 points on each axis (rpm and throttleposition) of the map. The new model 5.9 is much smaller, saving 14 ounces, and its 32-bit/20 Mhz microprocessor provides for 30 points on one axis and 32 points on the other. The result is much more precise fuel metering at all revs.
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Another easy-to-overlook development is the new path taken by the cam drive, meant to increase belt life. Fairly subtle, this involved relocating the idler pulleys closer to halfway between the now larger-diameter crank and cam pulleys, thus reducing the extreme deformation of the Desmoquattro's belts. The new belts also are wider and shorter, while the pulleys are slotted to enable fine-tuning of cam timing; gone are the woodruff keys of yesteryear.
Also invisible to the naked eye is the new water pump, 5mm larger in diameter, which in conjunction with a sevencell oil cooler and under-piston oil jets in the rear cylinder reduces operating temperatures while increasing reliability.
Signor Cugnetto used to work for Ferrari’s Formula One program, and his level of expertise was apparent as he explained, with the help of an impressive PowerPoint presentation, the intense testing that went into determining such variables as cam timing,
valve lift, intake and exhaust flow, etc. The fruit of his labor is an engine that produced 113 rear-wheel horsepower and 68 foot-pounds of torque on our dyno while meeting stringent U.S. emissions standards.
Our day at the track dawned cold but dry, which was more than our peers scheduled for the following day would be able to say. And while the sun occasionally poked through the high clouds, the weather remained chilly all day.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that traction was hard to come by, requiring two or more complete laps of the 3-mile circuit before the tires were up to temperature. And speaking of tires, the Ducati folks did themselves a disservice here, because the two 996s on hand were fitted wdth race-compound Dunlop D207GP and Michelin Pilot Sport tires, whereas the new 998s wore street-compound Dunlop D207 Sportmaxes. This negated the 998’s additional horsepower to the point that during one session, Sport Rider magazine’s Kent Kunitsugu and I circulated together with him on the 998 and me on the 996. His bike was faster down the straightaways, for sure, but I was able to exploit my bike’s stickier tires in the comers and especially through the 100-mph esses to keep up. If we’d had comparable tires, I’m sure he’d have left me for dead.
While the 998 and 996’s steel-trellis chassis are virtually identical, largely unchanged since the 916 of 1994, their engines are like night and day. Once considered a quickrevving Twin, the 996 now feels a bit lazy, even if its longer power pull made good use of its sticky rubber. The 998, in contrast, felt much more explosive, spinning up quicker, then breaking loose its streetcompound rear tire, at which point the engine spun up even quicker and traction went away in a hurry! It’s definitely more of an expert’s powerband, well suited to steering with the rear wheel. But once the tire hooked up, the scenery got blurry in a hurry and the track looked about 5 feet wide! It wasn’t quite as intoxicating an experience as riding the 996R racebike at Grattan, but it was closer to that than to the old 996.
Fortunately, near the end of the day, a truck brought a batch of race-compound Michelin Pilot Sports to the track, and one 998 was promptly outfitted with the gummier tires. Though time on that bike was limited, all who rode the Michelin-shod 998 reported much improved traction control, the previous slip-grip-slip scenario replaced by smooth, consistent drives. The moral of this story is replace your tires before you head to a track day.
Ducati forbade us to ride our 998 on the street due to customs restrictions, which frankly was all right by me, because I already knew what a rack the 996 was at anything less than a sporting pace. But a couple days after Buttonwillow, we trucked the 998 to California Speedway in Fontana for performance testing. Though primarily a super-speedway, the facility has a quarter-mile dragstrip that we were using for this issue’s Power Cruiser comparison-and which, with the impending closure of our long-time venue, Carlsbad Raceway, may become our permanent test site.
Unfortunately, Fontana isn’t blessed with a sticky launch pad, and is situated at 1100 feet elevation, much higher than Carlsbad, which lies at sea-level. We were also bucking a headwind. All of this undoubtedly hindered our acceleration tests, but the 998 still managed to best the last 996 we ran by a tenth of a second-this with a limited number of runs to save the clutch. Outright top speed improved by 5 mph, the 998 running 162 mph compared to the 996’s 157 mph, a clear indication of the 998’s newfound power.
So, while Ducati fans the world over anxiously await a restyled Superbike, the 998 is here today. It may look just like the 996, and the 916 before that, but in performance terms, it’s a totally new motorcycle. Interested? Get yours before they’re sold out.
DUCATI
998
$17,695
