Ducati has released a series of photos of its revolutionary Panigale 1199 superbike without its clothes on, showing exactly how the bike is held together in the absence of a traditional frame. But while the monocoque chassis is pretty fascinating to look at in the flesh, what strikes us most is just how incredibly compact the bike is every component has been squeezed into the tiniest possible space.
In fact, you can’t even see clean through the bike at any point until you reach the rear hugger. Gone is the traditional Ducati Pangiale 1199 trellis frame that usually wraps around the engine.
The Ducati Pangiale 1199 is famously the first production bike to abandon an ordinary frame altogether. One chunky piece up front joins the main front end headstem bearing races to the top radiator and the front and rear cylinder heads.
A pair of boomerang-shaped supports hold the seat and tail unit up off the engine’s rear cylinder, and a similar boomerang shaped mount hangs the swingarm off the crankcase. The rear shock sits slightly beyond horizontal, attached to the side of the rear cylinder. The engine doesn’t sit in a frame the engine more or less is the frame. You would have trouble fitting a credit card into any spot on the 1199.
Look at the exhaust tubing, there’s barely a cubic centimeter to spare. The top portion of the chassis also houses the airbox. The traditional Ducati Pangiale 1199 L-twin has been angled back 6 degrees to let the front wheel fit in front of the radiators. The Ducati Pangiale 1199 subframe and seat unit look absolutely tiny with the fairings off, but it’s worth noting that the boomerang brackets that hold the subframe to the cylinder and crankcase seem to be designed to allow access to the rear cylinder head.
It’s unclear from the photos where the battery box sits, but it looks as though simply removing the tank and seat unit will get you through to the top end for those fiddly desmodromic valve adjustments. The front cylinder though that’s a radiator-off job. Which means tank off, side fairings off, overflow bottle off, and you’ll also have to remove the plastic doodad that bolts to the top fairings on the left hand side.
Servicing the Ducati Pangiale 1199 will be a bit of a mission.One of the biggest problems that arises when you pack a lot of engine into a tiny amount of space is that there’s very little airflow over the surface of each component to keep temperature in check.
The Ducati Pangiale 1199 seems to have more or less surrendered to this fact the ultra-compact design seems almost to shield the cylinders from any cooling airflow they might receive. And there’s going to be heat a lot of it. Remember, that 1199cc engine develops a whopping 195 horsepower at 14,200 rpm. A ludicrously high rev limit for a twin. It’s the very definition of high performance. So here’s hoping the engineers at Ducati have found a better heat management solution than the potato-baking Aprilia RSV4 ships with. Whenever a new sportsbike hits the market, nakedbike fans like me start dribbling over the prospect of another high performance, balls-out streetbike with road-focused ergonomics and less nancy plastic covering up the sexy metal underneath.
But while the Ducati Pangiale 1199 is certain to spawn some sort of nakedbike, maybe a Streetfighter 1199, it’s hard to see how Ducati will get around the fact. The lack of a frame takes away one of the key design elements when you’re looking at nakedbikes, and the engine area is so visually cluttered with componentry that you lose the aesthetic effect of a dirty big engine swinging in the breeze as well.