If you take a step back, it’s been a fascinating month in the land of Ducati related internet news and rumors.

While the rumors and chit-chat about the new 999 have been building for quite sometime, much of the recent chatter started on March 15th when Superbike Planet ran a Q&A with Ducati CEO Federico Minoli in which he publically said the end was near for the current 999 and also seemed to open a window into the companies thoughts regarding the redesign of the bike…

From Superbikeplanet
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.

It didn’t take long after that quote circulated around the ‘net for ducati related message boards to light up. Suddenly the most devisive bike in the history of the company was open for public debate once again with everyone adding their 2¢ on what should or should not be changed on the new bike. Of course without much else to go on the chatter eventually boiled down to the well known 998 vs. 999 debates. Classic vs. Modern. Old school vs. New school. etc…

But then MCN showed up.

Roughly two weeks ago the British based mag, published an artist rendering of the rumored new Ducati 999. Obviously the mock up they published is not the real bike - but it is fairly faithful in concept to Minoli’s Superbikeplanet Q&A.

One again this set the online world of the Ducatista on fire. Posts, threads, comments, the whole online universe became a 999 replacement discussion. Is this the bike? Does it look to japanese? Does it appease the 998 crowd? Will the 999 owners switch over? I suppose in retrospect publishing an artist’s concept of a new 999 given the bi-polar nature of the bike’s history was bound to create a buzz.

Of course all of this is fairly straight forward internet based rumor stuff - what fascinates me is not so much the rumor itself, but that two days ago Ducati CEO Federico Minoli publically came out and refutted the MCN story (and artist rendering) in his desmo blog.

…the article on the front page of MCN from April 5, 2006 is mistaken in saying that we will produce “an economic” version for mass production. This counts as a real “bufala” (bufala in Italian literally means buffalo but it is used colloquially to mean a mistake) and does not correspond to our actual plans for the bike. This is not the first time that the news on the cover of MCN is lacking in a factual basis. For example, just take a look at the MCN article that supposedly anticipates a new version of the 999 - this is just a cut and paste combining the 999, 916 and Desmosedici and absolutely was not designed by us. I would like to use this opportunity to set things straight giving you the real facts about the bike.

What’s interesting here is not that Minoli came out and said, ‘gee that’s not the bike we’re building’ - a fair number of folks could have probably predicted that - but rather that he and Ducati waited almost two weeks to do it.

For quite awhile Minoli has been actively posting on his blog and using it as a vehicle to reach the Ducati consumer base. He’s touched on a number of topics and it’s a good read. But I can’t help but wonder why one would wait so long to respond to such an obvious and important part of the brand? Especially when you consider that Ducati and more specifically Minoli have this sort of web based immediacy available.

Perhaps it suggests that the higher ups at Ducati were actually allowing this rumored mock up to circulate around the internet in order to gauge the interest from the marketplace… Or maybe they were letting it run it’s course in order to build up more anticipation for the new bike.

Yet when you step back a bit it seems that Ducati has done a remarkable job of stoking the flames of interest from their constituents and other sportbike riders yet have offered virtually little in terms of actual detail. If you boil it down, they seem to be articulating that a new bike is in fact coming and it will appeal to both segments of the current and previous Ducatista superbike owners.

I wonder if that’s actually even possible. Can a 998 and a 999 owner both feel equally passionate about a new bike if their tastes are based on such extremely different branches of design? The few public comments coming out of Bolognia leave quite a bit up to the imagination of the end users and in this case I wonder how good of an idea that actually is.