Superbike Planet Interview with Ducati CEO Federico Minoli

Reader Tim M. passed along this interesting bit…Superbike Planet is running a fascinating interview with Ducati CEO Federico Minoli. The Q&A poses some interesting questions regarding the future of the marque and the bikes we might see being built in Bolognia in the near future.

Perhaps most notabe is a question regarding the past, the present and the future of the 999 platform…

Q. Do you think it’s fair to say that the 999 is at the end of its life, or nearing it?

A. Well, we declared the death of the 998 too early. We clearly don’t want to declare another one dead too early. But it has been on the market for quite a while now.

It’s a divisive bike. Somebody liked it very much, somebody did not like it very much. And so, of course, we are looking at a substitute. But when and how, we still don’t know. But I think that the new one will be more in the sign of tradition of Ducati. While the 999 was very forward and innovative and a kind of discontinuity with the past, it’s hard to improve Michelangelo’s Pieta, after all. And so I think that our decision which, with hindsight, maybe was not right, was to really go off the beaten track and try something very novelty. I think that we will try to go back to less angle and more round and stuff like that. But it still is a work in process, and we’ll see what happens there.

Unquestionably this seems to portend the end of the 999 as we know it. Personally I happen to dig the angled look of the 999 – but clearly the bike has always been an either love it or hate it proposition. Ultimately I think that the 999 will go down as yet another example of how fickle the design world and by extension marketplace tends to be.

When the bike first came out it was not only a depature from what the 998 had been but also where the other brands superbikes were. Today that’s not the case. The bike is not nearly as ‘out there’ as it was and going back to a more curvaceous look ultimately might be more dated than revolutionary imho…