Ducati 999: Birth of a Legend

Apparently in my continuing quest to become all things Ducati, I have one more opinionated review to pass forward into cyberspace…

Tonight I found myself completely engaged and engrossed in Alan Cathcart and Marc Cook’s recent book, “Ducati 999: Birth of a Legend”. Luckily for motorcycle fans in general and Ducatisti everywhere David Bull Publishing had both the guts to bring this wonderfully open and at times honest feeling book to the marketplace and also the ability to get the Ducati factory behind its creation.

The book details in no uncertain terms how the Ducati 999 came to be. As the sucessor to the venerable and iconic Ducati 916 motorcycle platform that revolutionized the sportbike world, the team at Ducati clearly had their hands full when they set their sights on redesigning the “it” motorcycle of the ninties. Alan & Marc capture this monumentual design journey from the inital sketching and pre-planning stages all the way through the final assembly and in the process shed a wonderful amount of light on what goes into rethinking a living legend. They share early design sketches, CAD drawings, mockups and mules that give the reader a wonderful sense of how the process works and truly gives you a behinds the scenes look at how this bike platform was created.

The book is not for the faint of heart however – while they clearly had tremendous access at Ducati, both to the people and the facilities, they go into rather amazing detail about some of the arguements and disagreements that took place while rebuilding and reinventing a legend. This is not a glossy new bike write up by an of the moment motorcycle mag.

To this end the book chronicles head designer Peirre Terblanche’s thinking and reasoning throughout the process and his continual head butting with the engineering staffs. According to Alan & Marc, Peirre was given one simple marching order when told that he needed to re-design the 916 platform and create a new bike, “make it fast, sexy, and red”.

I’m sure some die hard Ducati fans will no doubt take this opportunity to slam Peirres creation once more – yet regardless of how you feel about it, I found it remarkable that he is as open and willing to discuss why he choose to push for certain elements in his design while the fires continue to rage in the do you like/do you hate it debate among the Ducati faithful. As a fan of the design process in general, I found this a wonderfully gripping read because it truly illuminated how at Ducati function dictates form. If you don’t have much of an interest in that process this probably isn’t the Ducati book for you – however if you do enjoy learning about the process this book is full of hidden gems; such as why Ducati decided to use the CAN electrical system, why the tail section morphed in look and function throughout the process, and how they were able to reduce the number of parts on the final production model by an astounding 23.

If you’re hoping for an expose piece, this isn’t the book for you either. While the level of access is amazingly high and many of the direct quotes seem quite honest, it must be said that Alan & Marc clearly had a tremendous amount of factory support here and you’d have to expect that Ducati knew that they would get a glowing review of their new bike. However I’m frankly amazed that they allowed Alan & Marc to go as far as they did, and more importantly that were able to quote as extensively as they did. After reading this I imagine that there could have been any number of annoyed co-workers back in Bolognia once the book was finally published.

I’d also like to point out that the manufacturing and quality of the book is very, very good. There are just an wonderful amount of high quality pictures, sketches, CAD renderings and assorted other elements. This is by far one of the best graphic design and publishing jobs I’ve seen for a motorcycle related book.

Ultimately the bottom line is that I found Ducati 999: Birth of a Legend a blast to read. I couldn’t put it down and it was truly wonderful to be let in on the actual design process in such an open way, especially on such a flagship product and industry icon. I’m sure the darker moments or more argumentative discussions were left out, but that didn’t really bother me since this already had so much more information and war-stories than any motorcycle mag could hope to offer in a four page spread about a new bike. If you dig Ducati this is a must have and even if you own another liter bike brand, you ought to check this out. If nothing else to see how the competition does it.