Staff Blog: Dirty Ducati

I’ve been away for over a week testing, but for all that time I’ve been thinking of my filthy Hyperstrada.

Covered in thick dust, it looks like it’s spent months abandoned in the Sahara, but all that muck is from being parked-up at the Goodwood Festival of Speed last weekend.

Sleeping in the MCN van over the course of the weekend, I used the Ducati to go out for food each night. We had some lovely summer evenings, so pootling into Chichester after a day riding cool race bikes up the hill (including Kevin Schwantz’s ’94 RGV500 – see pic) was a real pleasure.

Although basking in glorious sunshine, Goodwood became a dust bowl, with all the people, cars and ‘tractor shuttles’ moving around on tinderbox-dry ground. My Hyperstrada seemed to cop most of the dust.

Worst still, I’ve had to wait a week to clean it. I travelled straight to the airport from Goodwood to fly to Italy, where we’ve been doing an MV F3 800 group test.

So the first thing I did when I got home this weekend is clean it. I gave it a thorough wash, chain clean and a liberal dousing with GT-85 over the engine, suspension linkages, side and centre stand.

Now she’s like new again and all is well in the world. This week I’ll have my head down writing that group test in the office, instructing at the Haslam School on Wednesday and racing my BMW Park Lane S1000RR at the weekend.

BLOG13 | HYPER13