Getting the PBM Ducati Panigale V4 R Ready for Road Racing

The check boxes are getting ticked by the Ducati Panigale V4 R. WorldSBK race winner? Check! British Superbike race winner? Check! Road Racing winner? Not just yet.

The Ducati Panigale V4 R was designed and developed to dominate, and Gigi Dall’igna has said that the goal is to make the bike the most sought after Superbike in every paddock.

Last year the Italian spoke about how important it was to win the North West 200 because this was a race that Ducati had never won. Breaking new ground was important 12 months ago, and it’s even more important now.

The new bike is one that can, in theory, be a contender at the Suzuka 8 Hours, and finally give Ducati a reliable platform to compete at races such as that. The North West 200 is also a potential precursor to once again seeing Ducati on the roads of the Isle of Man.

This bike has the potential to be a real challenger, but it will take success this weekend to really show just how good the Panigale V4 R can become.

To find out what goes into making a bike into a contender on the roads Asphalt & Rubber talked with Paul Bird Motorsport to find out exactly what it takes.

This weekend Alistair Seeley will be seeking to extend his record as the most successful rider in the history of the NW200. He’ll be doing it with a brand new bike, and one that he’s only had two days of running on before this week’s races.

Ryan “Rainbow” Rainey is the Crew Chief for Alistair Seeley at this week’s North West 200, but his day job with the team is performing the same role with Josh Brookes. The Northern Irishman is a former Irish Superbike champion and a veteran of the NW200. He explained the process for PBM of getting the bike ready for this week.

“Alaistair had one day at Portimao in the winter, but because the bike was so new to us, getting time with Josh Brookes and Scott Redding was the main priority,” recalled Rainey. “We managed to get him about 35 laps at the end of the test, and he was fast straight away.”

“He wasn’t a million miles off Josh’s times and that was very impressive. The project is so new for us, so the main focus has been on getting the bike ready for BSB, and the Northwest has been put on the back burner. It was a bit last-minute to get everything ready for the NW200 because we’ve come here from the Oulton Park weekend.”

“That was a big weekend for the team because it was really important to bounce back in BSB after the problems that Josh had a Silverstone. We did the double that weekend and then on the Tuesday after Oulton we shifted into NW200 preparation.”

“Part of the reason for having so little testing is that Alistair didn’t have his own bike. When PBM bought their bikes for 2019, they bought three bikes from Italy, with one broken down into the spares crate.”

“In BSB, you can’t have a rolling chassis, the bike has to stay in the spares crate, and that meant that it wasn’t until the Tuesday that we could start to build a bike for the NW200. We got it built, the trucks left on Saturday, and that night we got off the boat in Northern Ireland, and on Monday we had a test at Kirkistown to start setting up for the NW200.”

For Rainey the relationship with his rider is obviously critical and with Seeley having so little running it’s important to be able to short cut everything to get the most from the bike.

“I think it’s really useful to have raced here,” said Rainey. “Last year with Glenn, it was really useful, and it seems to be with Alistair too. We’ve got Phil Borley doing our electronics, they’re the exact same spec as BSB, but even though Alistair will talk to Phil, it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly he’ll be talking about if you haven’t raced here.”

“It really helps because if Alistair says “the bike gets unstable coming out of Station Corner. There’s a left kink over the rise in the road, and I’ll know exactly what he means and where he means it because I’ve done so many laps here.”

Having that experience allows Rainey to know exactly what to look out for with the bike, but there’s still a lot of work that goes in behind the scenes and behind the screens of a laptop. Calculations are made on any number of parameters, but this week is different. This week is a real jump into the unknown because there are so many different variables to consider.

“This year is a bit different for us because with the old bike we waited a year before racing it on the roads. By that time, we had a lot of experience and knowledge for what to expect. This year is different because we have a brand new bike, and are learning it on the fly. We’re learning what changes have an impact.”

“There’s some things that are a bit unknown for us though, and the wings are an example of that. We know they create downforce, but the difference between a short circuit and a roads circuit is that you’ll never be at the top speed of the bike for as long as you are here at the North West.”

“We’re trying to calculate suspension settings by trying to calculate the downforce load at 170mph into a braking zone. There’s not much calculation that we’ll do about that sort of detail on short circuits because the bike just kind of does it thing.”

“For the roads it’s different, but the problem is that we’ve never ridden this bike without the wings because they’re homologated for it. How it behaves without the wings is unknown for us, but we do think that they help with the wheelie control over crests, we could see that at Oulton Park in BSB. The bike still wants to wheelie but not as aggressively as it would be without it.”

While the wings are normally the first thing that catches one’s eye when looking at the Ducati Panigale V4 R, for the Paul Bird squad, the exhaust is perhaps the most striking element.

A Termignoni unit, the pipe’s long structure wraps under the tail in parallel, giving added length to the machine’s exhaust tract. This helps tune the back pressure for more torque at lower rpms, at the cost of horsepower on top.

Less noticeable is the revised gearbox, which unlike the WorldSBK-spec machine, has its neutral in-between first and second gear, rather than at the bottom of the gearbox like in the World Superbike Championship.

The electronics are the spec BSB electronics as well, which is a much less sophisticated package than what is available for the Panigale V4 R, and one of the key defining attributes for the British Superbike Championship.

The last curiosity, at least for our American readers, will be the use of Metzeler slicks, which are a popular choice on the other side of the pond, especially with the road racing contingent.

Meanwhile in the USA, Metzeler is known better for its cruiser and supermoto offerings…it’s interesting how a little geography affects something like tire choice.