Celebrate The Dying Superquadro V-Twin With An £8,500 Ducati Panigale 899
As Ducati reveals its Panigale V2 Superquadro ‘Final Edition’, we’re looking at a cheaper way to honour the departing engine
The end is nigh for the Ducati Superquadro V-twin. Recently, Ducati revealed the Panigale V2 Superquadro ‘Final Edition’, the last faired sports bike to use the engine, and it’s not clear what the future holds for V-twin-powered superbikes from the Italian manufacturer. But don’t worry - the classifieds are chock full of used options, and you won’t need to spend anything like as much as the £23,500 charged for the Superquadro FE.
We had myriad options to go for here but ended up picking one of the Panigale V2’s predecessors, the 899 Panigale. It was the first mid-size Ducati to use the Superquadro engine which had debuted a couple of years earlier in the 1199 Panigale, and is a considerably more complex bike than the 848 it replaced.
To help tame the 146bhp ‘L-twin’ nestling underneath its gorgeous bodywork, the 899 has a whole host of electronics working from different rider modes. These change parameters like the throttle response, power levels and the behaviour of the sophisticated traction control system and the ABS. The 848 on the other hand has…nothing, not even basic ABS.
While that makes the 899 less ‘raw’ than the 848, the suite of electronics means a mere mortal can extract far more performance from it without a code brown in their leathers. And if you’re really up to the task, you can always turn most of that stuff to low or off completely.
The downside? It’s a Ducati, so it originally came with a very Ducati price tag. That’s to say, quite a big one. It has been out 10 years though, and although residuals from the manufacturer’s bikes are stronger than most, enough time has passed for depreciation to work the values down to a much more attainable level.
The bike you see here is up for sale at a dealer in North Yorkshire for £8,495. It’s done 17,000 miles in the 10 years since it left the factory in Borgo Panigale, equating to less than 2,000 miles a year. It also comes with a tail tidy, bubble screen, crash bungs, adjustable levers and even a trickle charger, so you can use it as sparingly as the previous owner(s) and be sure that it’ll start after a fallow spell.
It comes with a full service history, and the dreaded Desmo service (the expensive one involving valve clearances) was done 2,000 miles ago.
Tempted?
Matt has a background in motoring journalism of the four-wheeled variety but has long had a passion for motorbikes, taking his first steps into riding in 2010.
