The Ducati Panigale V4 R is the newest bike on the Superbike block, and as you’d expect it is the most advanced bike on the WorldSBK grid.
The Italian manufacturer has developed a tremendous package over the winter, to immediately vault to the top of the pile in the production based series, and with Alvaro Bautista having been undefeated in the opening two rounds of the championship, he has laid the foundations of a very strong title challenge.
This is a production based series, and Ducati has developed a so-called ‘homologation special.’ While the rest of the grid comprises of heavily developed machinery, the Ducati was developed as a no holds barred, pure bred racing machine.
This is a throwback to a bygone era when the likes of Honda would develop their Superbike machinery with the sole goal of winning the title.
No compromises are made with a homologation special. Other than costing a maximum of €40,000, there is very little that isn’t maximised on the machinery.
This has been shown so far in 2019 with Alvaro Bautista and the V4 R dominating the opening two rounds of the 2019 WorldSBK season.
The Spaniard – fresh from MotoGP – has adapted superbly to the production based series. Having been victorious in Australia, the 34-year-old travelled to Thailand knowing that he was under pressure to back up his results with another strong showing. Pole positions, three wins, and three fastest laps certainly ticked those boxes.
Looking through the speed trap figures from all three races there was a huge difference between the championship leader and his pursuers. Across every racing lap in Buriram, he was an average of 5 mph faster than Rea and 6 mph faster than Alex Lowes.
As Marc Marquez said in Argentina, having that top speed is “free time” for a rider. You don’t have to push as hard in the braking zone or try and squeeze a bit more corner speed from your bike. You can ride slightly within yourself through the twisty sections, because you know that you’re bike will be faster on the straight.
That being said you’ve still got to win the races, and it’s impossible not to be impressed by Bautista thus far. He’s a former 125GP world champion and race-winner in 250GP. His talent is clear, but he has a bike advantage at the moment, and Thailand proved that once again.
In Australia we saw Bautista mirror, signal, and maneuver to take the lead from Rea in races. He could overtake on short straights in Australia, and in Thailand the V4 R was on average over 5 mph faster through the speed trap. Once he’s in clear air, he could use this to his advantage and open big leads.
To put that top speed advantage in perspective, it basically translated into a half a second on the opening half of the lap in Buriram. Through two races, we’ve seen the Spaniard dominate at two very different circuits.
Australia was a perfect storm with his favorite track and a riding style that works superbly there. Thailand on the other hand was very different, with twisty sections of the track, but once again we saw him dominate.
In those twisty sections it was very interesting to compare Bautista to his rivals. Rea and Lowes were a match in Sector 3 and Sector 4, where their bikes were more nimble than the Ducati.
They also had to push harder in those sections just to try and compete with the Ducati. As mentioned earlier, if your bike is faster in a straight line, you can ride with some leeway in the other sections of the track.
The slow-motion replays of Bautista in the second-half of the lap showed how hard he was pressing at all times though. He was sliding the rear on corner entry, pushing the front through the corners, and trying to get on the gas earlier than everyone else.
Under braking however, the bike was struggling, and we could see that Bautista was braking so much earlier than his rivals into heavy braking zones.
Some of that comes down to riding styles, but most of it seems to come from the settings that he uses. With a very steep front end, it transfers all of the weight to the nose of the bike once he brakes hard. With lots of weight on the front of the bike, it’s harder to make the bike stop because the balance is on such a knife edge.
It works in clear air because he can pick his braking zones and carry corner speed, but look at the overtaking attempts on Rea and Lowes in Race 1, when he struggled to get the bike stopped and make the corner. He consistently ran in too hot when trying to overtake under braking.
This will be something to watch for in future as the rest of the field closes on Ducati, and starts to apply more pressure to Bautista during races.
On the other side of the Ducati pitbox we saw Chaz Davies make a step forward on the Sunday in Thailand. But, the red flag in the Superpole race and a technical failure in Race 2 meant he could have been inside the top five, but with those factors working against him it didn’t let him show his true potential.
A winter interrupted by injury and technical issues robbed him of valuable track time, but with a two-day test at Aragon he’s now far more likely to show his real potential.
Everyone knows what Davies can do, and it’s only a matter of time until he’s back to the front of the field. He weighs almost 33 lbs more than Bautista, so what works for the Spaniard won’t necessarily work for Davies, but in Thailand he said that he had started to work down his own path and develop a feeling with the bike.
Finding that understanding of the bike means he should be very competitive in Aragon. Davies was, on average, 2 mph slower than Bautista, but in Race 2 and despite being in the pack, he was faster than Rea and Lowes in the opening sector of the lap. This is certainly an illustration of the potential for the Ducati.
His style is different to Bautista, and from trackside you can see that he was getting on the gas later than his teammate. Some of this is down to bike’s setup, but more is down to the evolution of styles for a Superbike rider.
In the past, we saw Rea and Davies ride aggressively on the brakes – their bikes were also designed with this in mind – whereas with Bautista, he is trying to carry more corner speed than in the past.
For a long time we were taught that the Pirelli tires wouldn’t work in this way. Lap times could be had – as shown by the initial pace of Yamaha in 2016 – but it wouldn’t work for a race. Maybe with the larger profile tires Pirelli introduced last year, Bautista has unlocked a key to performance.
It will be very interesting to see if this continues to be the case in Aragon.
Photos: Ducati Corse
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