Race Watch
FASTEST ON THE FLIPSIDE
Ducati and Chaz Davies find their stride in World Superbike
Gordon Ritchie
It may have taken too long for comfort, but Chaz Davies and Ducati Corse have turned the official Aruba.it Racing 1199R Panigale into the hottest current World Superbike property there is. It’s been a long road back for Ducati. Historically the Italians have owned more executive World Superbike real estate than anybody. They have been the longest-term fanatics, the ones who stayed put with a factory team while others came and went.
That all changed after Ducati’s MotoGP obsession blinded its 20/20 Superbike vision in 2010 and the factory pulled the sump plug on the official Ducati Corse World Superbike project. The lack of a fullfactory squad did not stop the 1098R—the final iteration of a V-twin that could trace its greatest DNAbackto the Pantah soocc engine—winning the championship with the supported Althea Racing team and Carlos Checa as recently as 2011.
Despite a hyper-radical design revolution for Ducati’s flagship model, the 2013 introduction of the first Panigale to World Superbike proper was a disappointment, largely because the bike was so different from anything that Checa, new Ducati race team partners Alstare, and even Ducati
WORLD SUPERBIKE
itself had ever raced in World Superbike guise.
With a massively oversquare bore and stroke, monocoque headstock/airbox/main chassis member, side-mounted horizontal shock, and so many other left-field technical features, the
new bike was a profound technical challenge for the entire Ducati squad.
Results were poor for some time after its introduction, despite a first podium (in the wet) in 2013 for Ayrton Badovini and a smattering of podiums
in 2014 for new boys Davide Giugliano and Chaz Davies but— tellingly—only after the team was taken back into traditional factory control again.
Nothing underlines how difficult the Panigale was to make competitive than the fact that it did not secure its first win at World Superbike level until 2015. In year three...
Davies was second overall that year but 132 points behind the peerless green beacon of Jonathan Rea’s Kawasaki. Even now, only contemporary Superbike superstar Davies has actually won world championship races on the Panigale.
So what were the eventual big jumps that turned the Ducati from a not-quite-winning bike in 2015 to the one that was victorious in seven of the final eight races of 2016? A small step back, it appears...
Who better to tell the tale than Davies himself? His quite
brilliant finish to 2016 was all down to rediscovering a consistently effective chassis setup after unwittingly heading away from the true development path that had finally been hacked out after so much hard work in 2015.
“We started off 2016 more or less where we finished 2015, with a few alterations to the bike,” Davies says. “We obviously thought we had stepped forward rather than backward. But when we got to the midpart of last season I had difficulty in the warmer races. Sepang in Malaysia was really difficult. We still finished on the podium, and I could see the winner at the end of the race, but it
was not the same feeling as I had with the bike in 2015. Ducati went back to the drawing board after the postLaguna Seca summer break and put the numbers together for everything that had changed.”
The final sums provided back-tothe-future chassis settings for two mid-summer on-track test sessions that would prove vital for Davies. The changes “gave me back the feeling of where we had finished 2015,” explains Davies. “There were no real mistakes as such or big development changes that put us in that position. It was just mistakes in using the data we had from winter instead of the hot races.”
In essence, a return of front-end confidence when approaching the limit and pure drive grip over a full race were the main changes Davies knows made the real difference at season’s end. The optimum setup window for the bike is finally clear, if not huge.
There were also a small series of engine upgrades in 2016—little gains here and there. All useful in a main straightaway dogfight, especially as the factory Kawasakis definitely seemed to lose top-end under the 20i5-to-20i6 rule changes. It’s also about the other guy’s bike sometimes.
Davies, contrary to the initial scepticism from some about the
IN WORLD SUPERBIKE TERMS RIGHT NOW, IF WE CAN PARAPHRASE MOTOGP TERMINOLOGY, DAVIES IS AN ALIEN.
complicated Ducati’s ability to ever be truly competitive, is adamant the Panigale is not as much of a reverse-engineered spacecraft as it looks. Especially after three years in the hands of the factory team and himself. “On any bike, whether it is something as radical as the Panigale or something else, you always learn,” he explains about the return of Ducati as potential champions. “The Panigale is really special and it’s a special bike to ride when you first jump on it. It does not have the typical characteristics of other bikes. But if you have a good rider and very importantly a good team of people that are willing to keep working and trying to step forward, I honestly don’t think there is any secret to it.”
There’s no discounting Davies’ influence. In World Superbike terms right now, if we can paraphrase MotoGP terminology, Davies is an alien. By constant growth, if not by birth, and all while leading the development pushes on his big desmo
twin, the current racebike has been made in his image.
Welshman Davies is familiar to American racing fans, but he has come a long way since he was an AMA Supersport, FX, and Daytona Sportbike competitor. It has been an often convoluted, even tortuous, way. He now has vast experience, of 125 and 25OCC two-strokes in the MotoGP paddock and even a few full-blooded MotoGP race outings. He has ridden threeand four-cylinder World Supersport bikes and was WorldSSP champion on a Yamaha YZF-R6 in 2011.
He’s won races on every kind of World Superbike he has ridden since then—V-4S (Aprilia), inline fours (BMW), and most recently big Ducati twins. All this experience has given Davies all the right tools, and he’s backed by a strong team. It all came good just too late to fight Rea or Tom Sykes for the overall championship in 2016, but in the future? Seven peerless race wins from the final eight races in 2016 mean anything is possible.
