Coming home from offshore I was plugging away at the long list of chores when all of a sudden I found myself with time off work, a dyno tuned bike and an advertisement for a track day in two days time staring me in the face. Not to worry, my good lady gets the heebie jeebies watching me at the track so the lack of assistance in starting the bike will give me a graceful exit and time to grow a pair, eh? Nope, she called my bluff and promptly agreed to help out, something about wanting to see what all the time, effort and massively blown budget had produced. Bugger, but after a deep breath in went the entry.
Nah, in truth I was busting to ride the thing in anger, having never ridden further than up and down my driveway in 3 years...and 95% of that was either coasting or being pushed. So despite not being able to think of anything that needed doing there were still a fair few pre-wedding jitters.
Part of the deal with my better half helping me out was that after a week of early starts for work there would be no 5am wake up on the weekend, so I got up with the still farting sparrows and headed off to set up in time for briefing, while she displayed appropriately Italian time keeping and rolled up at a far more civilised hour. I was just grateful for the assistance and was quite happy to miss the first wintery session as the thermometer crawled into double digits.
It was funny actually, not too many people give an old 999 a second glance these days, especially when the old brontosaurus is parked next to a sleek new (at the time) 959. A couple of people took a second look at the starter in the background, someone spotted the breather on the tank and made a comment when they tapped on the carbon tank, but otherwise it just faded into the wallpaper amongst far more glamorous 1299's, S1000RR's, ZX10's etc.....until the time came to light the fire in the ol' girl. The way a bevy of heads whipped around would have had a chiropractor reaching for the new Porsche catalogue.
With no assistance to start it I hadn't been able to sort the lower regions of the fuel map since the dyno session, when it was "idling" at about 4000rpm. All I'd done was adjust the throttle stop on the quick action throttle. Warming it up around the 4000rpm mark, barking through the big Leo Vince she was a pretty anti-social ol' girl. But as she warmed up I wound off the throttle stop until she sorta settled around 3000rpm, meaning the relative "quiet" of a WWll Spitfire. The silence was deafening once shut-down.
Oh shit, they've called the 5 minute warning, gear on.....just in time for the 2 minute warning: into 6th gear and crank up the starter again, "ROOOAAAR!", clutch in, foot on the brake to stop the rear wheel and clutch flying around, a nod to my good lady and she removes the lock pin. I take my hat off to her, she's made of stern stuff, plenty of folks wouldn't want any part of the mechanical mayhem that had just been thrashing around in front of her. Not forgetting that parked behind the bike handling the starter you are literally staring down the double barrelled shotgun about to blast sound and fury at your face a metre away! You know those poor buggers in WW1 who had to spin the prop on the Sopwith Camels etc....yup, that about sums it up. "Contact!"
Despite not being super-keen she knows the routine well and with another nod she removes the rear stand, and we're rolling....oops, not quite! The unfamiliar clutch takes up a looong way out and I'm a little slow to reach the take up point as I turn out of the bay and have to paddle it around like a noobie. Then I'm rolling down the pit road slipping the clutch like grandma out of the church carpark. First is soooo long, somewhere between 1st and second on the 749R which itself has an already tall first gear.
Luckily the day is light-on for numbers and the track is clear when I peel out of the pit exit into Turn 1, still in 1st where even on the R1 I'd have hooked second before entering the track. Exiting the turn I finally get to properly open the gas on a World Superbike engine (!!!), something I'd seriously doubted would ever happen at various points in the project. It was a pretty tentative effort to be honest, expecting it to be a little wooly or boggy: WOT on the dyno is a whole different kettle of kippers compared to way you ride a bike on track. But it just felt crisp and super smooth.
The first couple of laps were pretty much just an exploration, with every sense at a Defcon 1 level of preparedness, waiting for something ugly/expensive to happen...but it didn't. So I gradually cranked it up, with everything feeling better and better, until I couldn't resist giving it a serious run through the gears.......holy shit, the ol' girl can GO! The only concerns were the massive headshake resulting from the bike accelerating/transferring weight in a way the 749R never could, and 2-3 false neutrals.
I eventually rolled back into the pits feeling like I'd lost 30kg's: the monkey was off my back.
I was a lil' worried about the false neutrals (gearbox issue?) so I made some minor adjustments to the lever and reminded myself to change more decisively. I had the laptop there so I could adjust the Nemesis quickshifter ignition cut if needed (60ms is default, I had it at 50ms) but I figured I'd try the simple stuff first. I was reluctant to go off on tangents chasing suspension/geometry at this early stage so just put a couple of clicks on the damper to minimise the head-shake. I could/should have adjusted it on the fly but at the time my brain was too busy processing inputs to organise any outputs.
Second session was a more serious effort, extending the envelop each lap, building the pace. I started getting a handle on the completely foreign shift points and noted the "office" on the 749R/999RS was a lot busier place than even the R1 I'd previously ridden around here: more grunt, with the gears crammed closer together, meant spending more of that $1 worth of concentration Keith Code says we have to ration: basically there was more to do in a shorter space of time. Getting the bike on track had been one hell of a learning curve but riding (racing?) it was obviously going to be another.
But jeezus, it wasn't half fun imagining the "WTF?" being muttered inside some helmets when my "ancient" old 999 came steaming past a modern litre bike (picture grandma galloping along with skirt up around her hips and petticoats flying). Nah, truthfully there wasn't much in it really, get a good run and she'd just overhaul a "new" CBR/GSXR (this was in 2016, an awkward time for both those models) but a new ZX10R/S1000RR/R1M at the time would still edge away, which I was more than happy with.
And it does it in quite a unique way. Imagine Ducati had borne a 749R out of wedlock and it was adopted out to be raised in the Russian state-sponsored doping program: a 749R on equine strength steroids. The more you rev it the happier it feels, with fantastic shove, and just so smooooooth. An 1198 with similar power is Joe Frazier throwing huge weighty uppercuts every power pulse where this is more like Bruce Lee throwing 5 punches/second. It's hard to explain, but the theatrical WWll fighter plane sound completely contradicts how turbine smooth it feels thanks to the weightless perfectly balanced internals. And the throttle response is just beautiful.
It's a little disconcerting in that the ol' brontosaurus pulls hard right to the redline. Because it's built to do 13000-13500rpm my conservative 11500rpm rev limit (for longevity) is still in the meat of the power, so there is no feeling of breathlessness or power falling off telling you "Hey pal, time to change gear!" Hence it's very easy to hit the limiter, not helped by the ultra-close ratio gearbox jamming 6 gears into the space of 4. Just something else to get used to.
Unfortunately that is where my day ended. I must have been a tad eager with the throttle and the legacy of not sorting the low/idle range fuelling came back to bite me on the bum: starting for the 3rd session and she only fired on one cylinder having fouled the front plug. I'd packed a heap of tools but not the thin walled plug socket necessary to extract the plug, and no-one else had anything suitable so I was done and dusted.
But I was a happy camper all the same. I hadn't missed a single shift the previous session, the headshake was much better, she wasn't far off being a very sweet thing. I'd been so worried my adapted 749R/999R throttle bodies and "small" exhaust would strangle it but they actually seem to work really well with the reduced rev limit and there were no "holes" over what is a good spread of power.
Bottom line, the ol' girl again exceeded my expectations, just feeling great out of the box with only minor sorting required. So when's the next track day then.....?
PS: might as well slip this in here: obviously mine was a pretty low key introduction, yeah? So if you were ever curious about how a top level team might approach running something like an ex-Factory or RS Ducati race bike this is quite insightful:
