Hypermotard

HYPERMOTARD

TheNEW Standards SPECIAL SECTION

Ducati's concept "Super Scrambler" may already be on its way to showrooms

KEVIN CAMERON

H ERE IS A COMPACT, NEAT MOTORCYCLE with the lean, direct style of a dart. It has a dual-sparkplug, 992cc aircooled V-Twin engine, good brakes and good suspension. The name implies that this is another of those long-legged oddities intended for a strange sliding sport, prac ticed only by superheroes in orange shirts. It is not. It is a "standard" cleverly disguised by marketing. This is a sporting motorcycle on which you sit up naturally and comfortably. You can have normal, pleasing motorcycle fun on this bike, and it has compelling style. At the recent Designers' Night of the Motorcycle Design Association, it was awarded Best of Show.

This bike will liberate prisoners-the salaiymen and women of modern life who stare out at the car park from their middleimportance desks, wonr Th dering how life's many {~ predictabilities can slowly 0 La i'~ I U a anaesthetize those who are trapped in them. They need help. Seventeen-inch slicks and 5-foot-long forks are not necessary to stimulate the imagina tions of these detainees. No need to actually swoop up 60-foot sand dunes or brake-slide to a perfect apex on pavement-it's enough just to picture leav ing that car park with some inward sparkle. Features include a 50mm Marzocchi RAC fork, forged Marchesini wheels and a steel-tube fork brace. The front brake is a single 320mm disc with a radial-style four-piston Brembo caliper. The DS1000 engine delivers power through a sporting back-torque-limiting clutch. BTL clutches allow hard braking without the danger that the rear tire will hop or be dragged, complicating corner entry. Rear suspension is by Ducati's single-sided swing arm, controlled by an Ohlins remote-reservoir damper. A nice small touch is that the folding rear view mirrors double as handguards/turnsignals. To sum up, a natural riding position, premium compo nents, high style and light weight.

Designer Pierre Terblanche says, “When the Hypermotard arrives, it will have 100 horsepower.” At 385 pounds, it is lighter than the Multistrada, and it is small and “as simple as possible.” Wheelbase will be in the 57-inch range.

“This is not really an off-road bike,” Terblanche continues. “Street supermotards have faded because (as tall as the real thing is), anyone under 6-foot-3 can’t ride them. They are nothing more than motocross bikes with 17-inch wheels stuck on. They vibrate, are too tall, too uncomfortable, are underpowered and have no fuel range at all. The Hypermotard is tailored to be the smallest bike we could build with the biggest engine. And you can sit on it for more than 20 minutes.”

1 think of the large number of riders I know whose secret favorite among modern machines is the Suzuki SV650.

They like it because it’s simple fun to ride. A large part of its charm is its lack of obligation-you can ride it without feeling you must memorize Mike Hailwood’s biography and have both a race-school diploma and back pain from tucking in. Hypermotard elevates simple fun to high style and 100 hp. Why air-cooled?

“1 think air-cooling is highly underrated,” states Terblanche. “If this bike had been water-cooled, there’s no way it could have been this small.”

He pointed out that as soon as you begin adding a radiator and the other things that go with current liquid-cooled engines, the rider begins to be pushed back and the riding position ceases to be as attractive. Many believe air-cooled engines are hard to push through emissions and sound tests, but as Harley Chief Engineer Earl Werner said in the 1980s, “That’s what engineering is for-to make it possible for us to do what we want to do.

Not to lorce us to do what technology wants."

Hypermotard was a three-month project. it. like the SportClassics, dates back to 1998. We were looking at designing a bike to fill or create a new niche. The Monster had been very successful because it broke the mold,~' Terbianche says.

One result was tile Multistrada; another a supermotard-style Twin.

The latter was at first rejected because, "The market research done at the time said that we could never sell a motard. Of course, market research also said that we could never sell tile SportClassics."

All companies continually do marketing studies, but the results are only an indication, a weather vane, not a sales order. Boeing’s most successful airliners have not been those designed by consultation with the airlines or with passengers. They have been the designs that resulted from knowing what engineering had now made it possible to build-then building it. When the 747 was first proposed, it attracted criticism for being too big.

Yet it really created the modern mass air-travel market.

So Terblanche produced the very different idea we see here:

To design a motorcycle with the universal appeal that, for example, the British Twins-Triumphs, BSAs and Nortons-once had. They were lean, powerful, good-looking. And very rideable.

“The Hypermotard is extremely simple and is no more than a modern ‘Scrambler,’ which was the consummate standard dressed up as an off-road bike,” he says. “I had an experimental budget in 2004 and the bike was done without a brief, in a fairly short space of time. It was done with modern technology and hands-on craft, very few sketches. We used CAD where we needed it for precision, but the layout resulted from two days with a foam-core model.”

Hypermotard is now under consideration for production.

Like it? I do. □

HYPERMOTARD