Flight of the Dirty Bird
FLIGHT OF THE DIRTY BIRD
Race Ventura: Will our Duc Detective flip the world's most
MARK CERNICKY
THE FLIGHT PLAN INCLUDED STRAFING a cross-section of geographically diverse terrain in the coastal hills behind Ventura, California-just a hop across the 101 freeway from the Ventura County Fairgrounds and its famed dirt oval, where pas de Duc part deux would transpire.
CLEAR! Flick the power-on toggle, push the OE starter button and the 90-degree V-Four is instantly alive, a big angry dog gargling 91 octane, with lighter notes of dry-clutch jingle, straight-cut gear whine and intake whistle. One of the most attractive features of any street-tracker is the rid ing position, really very comfortable, even if the seat is nothing more than an inch of Lockhart Phillips seat foam. The RSD rearsets’ high perch placement makes sense when banking the Ducati into tight comers. Evasive lean angles are a snap with the wide bar. Hard braking isn’t hard, even with just a single Brembo Monobloc, and the fat Goodyear dirt-track footprint doesn’t squirm as much on the street as I’d anticipated.
The throttle works both ways, they say. This particular twist tube happens to be connected to 990cc of purebred MotoGP powerplant, with rods of titanium, engine covers of magnesium and balls of forged Italian steel. The D16’s V-Four was developed by Ducati engine project manager Marco Saim to make power in
the era when Ducati’s simple plan was to make more than anybody else, before the theory of rideabilty expanded to embrace things like crossplane cranks and GPS-coordinated traction control. The vanguard of those 200-crankshaft horses comes in with a swift kick in the midrange (made more pronounced by FMF exhaust singlets) that feels like what most literbikes pack up top. And when it hits, the bike’s wheel-spinning powerband pulls very hard, without letup or remorse, right into the 14,200-rpm limiter I was using for wheelie control (a couple of times, as the front continued skyward, I worried the limiter would never get here). Lugging short shifts to get across town to the fairgrounds was easy enough. At idle, the thing sounds not unlike a large group of open-piped Harleys, which allowed us to attract only the right kind of attention—a couple of wide-eyed youngsters on BMX bikes.
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All up, a fun, edgy motorcycle to ride around on the street.
I’ve raced at Ventura dirt track more than a few times, and I have to say I had never seen the surface in worse shape, despite the nice, smooth prep our rental arrangement had called for. Instead, the packed-clay/decomposed-granite mix was covered in ribbons of marbles ranging in size from pea to gnocchi to golf ball to bocee.
Expressing my dismay to the resident track tender made it clear that customer service was not Job One: “Putyour balls in a wagon and run it in high? the old gentleman barked, or something like that, “and show ’urn you ain’t afraid to die?
Pardon ?
“We can water it, then smooth the clods down, but then it’s gonna be slick.”
Caught between clay rocks and a concrete hard place, I broke out the CW Honda CRF450DT’r, my usual circletrack racer, for a few sketchy warm-up laps in the cool coastal fog, then locked and loaded the big Due gun—its tall, wide handlebar the only familiar thing in sight. Massive, flywheel-less power and the sort of traction one might experience wearing not one but two steel shoes in a marble factory during an ice storm/rock slide, however, were not conducive to the lurid sort of powerslide rhumba I’d been dreaming of for weeks.
However, we are professionals, and we did go balls-in-wagon enough to crack the throttle a times, enough to instantly expand that concrete wall, enough to understand just what King Kenny when he croaked the words years ago: “They don’t pay me enough to ride this thing.”
Well. I bet they paid Ken Roberts substantially more to ride a TZ750 dirt-tracker than they pay me. And that thing only made a limp 125 horsepower.
So, this Dirty Bird’s potential on a smooth dirt surface must remain, for now, unexplored territory, or maybe even forever; Justyn Amstutz, the owner, whose final check has cleared the bank, was beginning to look a bit queasy.
