2018 -- DUCATI PANIGALE V4 DESIGNER ABOUT HIS SKETCH

Designing a new motorcycle is an arduous process. It takes years of ideas and crumpled up drawings and scrapped ideas before the actual machine runs and can be presented to the world. These drawings of Ducati’s new Panigale V4 show just how far back and how far-reaching the ideas went before the team in Bologna landed on a finished product. Some of the drawings go back to 2015, or even 2014. To find out which ideas were pure concept and which ones almost made it, I got in touch with Ducati and asked the designer himself.

Julien Clement is the boyish, 29-year-old Frenchman, reserved and polite, who was tasked with penning Ducati’s latest flagship superbike. Originally, he was brought in to Ducati after his collegiate sketch of what would become the Scrambler Icon was picked off the wall by the highest Ducati brass. He was hired to complete it, and then went on to sculpt the Ducati SuperSport and now the Panigale V4.

Arguably the most interesting thing about this sketch is the shock mounted on the left side of the machine, as it was on the previous generation of Panigale (1199 and 1299). “We decided in 2016 there was no space for the shock to be on the side,” Clement said. It was more than a rendering that decided it—the side-mounted shock made it all the way to testing. “It was giving ergonomic problems to the test rider due to the wider engine,” he explained. The 1,103cc V-4 in this Ducati is shorter (in both length and height) than the outgoing V-twin, but it is wider.