Photo by: Ben Ben Blacksheepmanila Chan (www.blacksheepmanila.com) and Dante Dizon (www.13luckymonkey.com)
written by: Michael-Rex Carbonell
The Italian manufacturer, Ducati, is well-known for designing high performance sports bikes that are as exotic as they are fast. However, a comfortable riding position is generally sacrificed in order to achieve such a level of performance. For those who are currently unaware, we at BCR tend to deviate from standard bike builds, which is a sentiment that remained when we were approached to convert a Ducati Panigale 899.
In typical Ducati fashion, the Panigale 899 started out as a weekend race bike, & when the bike came to our possession, it bore all the expected scars (e.g. a cracked fairing held by cable ties, deep scratches on the bar ends, broken steering stopper tabs, leaking fork legs, & light switches held by their safety wires). Fortunately enough, we were asked to build a naked bike & scrapped the fairing completely.
Upon removing the fairing, we noticed that a lot of the bike’s electronics were built into the fairing itself. Removing the fairing resulted in an entirely exposed build, meaning we needed to design & fabricate special brackets & a casing to keep the bike looking sleek & flush. To achieve this, we fabricated enclosures for the ABS pump, the battery box, the coolant reservoir, and the bottom radiator. Additionally bottom panels were made & attached to the stock gas tank that was initially built into the stock fairing. These bottom panels wee also used to house the bike's ECU & remaining electronics.
The Panigale comes stock with clip-on bars which are set up for a forward aggressive riding position. For this build, the owner specifically requested an upright position so as to make longer rides more comfortable, even in metro-area traffic.
To accommodate, we used tapered, low rise MX bars & swapped the stock upper trees with a custom ordered triple tree, courtesy of Germany’s performance.de, built with risers set up for tapered bars & a bracket to hold the stock gauge.
The bike was originally purchased red & painted gun metal gray. To satisfy the owner’s request for a stealthy look, we gave the build a simple, black color scheme, mixing matte & gloss with added gold pinstripe detail.
Maintaining the bike’s speed & exotic looks, we were able to provide the owner with a bike as quick & as flashy as the original yet one that was comfortable enough to ride as frequently as all bikes should be ridden.