Real world rides, real world riders

Mona Lisa motorcycle - RSD Desmo tracker road test

The Ducati Desmosedici RR is the most desirable series production motorcycle ever made. Full stop. It’s the modern motorcyclist’s Mona Lisa.

Still, imagine sneaking past the security guards at the Louvre in Paris, and drawing graffiti on the real Mona Lisa – a neat goatee beard, maybe, and a pair of glasses.

That’s the sort of sacrilege of a two-wheeled work of art which some horrified purists reckon Roland Sands has accomplished in creating the Desmo Tracker – his transformation of one of those 1500 MotoGP replicas into a high-barred hotrod modelled on a US flat-tracker, complete with chunky dirt-oval tyres, and totally devoid of the Desmosedici RR’s curvaceous bodywork.

On the other hand, while some remain firmly convinced that Sands has made a sow’s ear from a silk purse in building the Desmo Tracker, there’s a huge swell of opinion believing Roland’s done entirely the opposite – not least Justyn Amstutz, the owner of the bike.

“I’m so stoked that we did this project,” enthuses Justyn. “Roland and his guys at RSD have produced an amazing piece of art that’s entirely functional, and in doing so kept with the original spirit of Ducati in building the Desmo. But – what the hell are we gonna do next, to top this one?”

What indeed – Justyn actually owns three Desmosedici RRs, starting with the one he signed up for within minutes of the Ducati website opening up to accept orders for the model back in 2006. He regularly rides this D16 at track days and on Sunday mornings, but while he was metaphorically standing in line waiting for it to be built, the opportunity to buy another RR came up, still in the original crate – which is where Justyn plans to keep it as a display item as well as a just-in-case replacement for his D16 track day ride. But then, like buses, you wait for ages and three come along one after another. So when the chance came through his business for Justyn to acquire a zero-mileage repossessed RR that the ex-owner had taken a loan to buy, but couldn’t keep up the payments on, he figured – why not?

It was all Roland Sands needed: “Ever since I got one, I’ve always wanted to do something with a Desmo,” he declares: ”Only I wasn’t going to touch my own bike, which is perfect. But I really wanted to build something with the V4 motor, which I think is incredible. I guess I hoped someone would bring me a crashed Desmo and say – here, go for it, but I didn’t expect to do it with a brand new one!

“Justyn wanted to build a street tracker he could ride to work that could also be a legitimate dirt-track racer – so I started drawing and sketching stuff up, and we came up with something pretty cool which we took three months to build without in any way intruding on the original bike. The terms MotoGP and dirt-track couldn’t be further from each other in terms of function and aesthetics, so our job was to blend the two into something that was ready to ride with a push button starter and lights, comfortable ergos, street and dirt worthy suspension, and 180-plus horsepower on tap, while retaining the best of the original design.”

You heard right – no Desmosedici RRs were hurt or mistreated in the making of this motorcycle, meaning that all the original bodywork and other parts were preserved to allow Justyn to use these as spares in case he crashes one of his other two such bikes, and indeed Roland insists that the Desmo Tracker can be switched back into an RR at a moment’s notice – okay, make that two moments.

“The goal was to really not cut it up,” he says. “We wanted to maintain the stock bike as much as possible, because it already had a bitchin’ trellis steel frame, which geometrically was fairly close to what we wanted, so we haven’t altered it in any way apart from cutting off a few unnecessary tabs we can easily replace. We made different triple clamps for the stock 43mm Öhlins forks which we had revalved by RaceTech, but the big thing was getting the wheel offset far enough out so you have enough steering angle to be able to ride the thing like a dirt tracker, because a GP bike doesn’t have much in the way of steering lock.” Adding 35mm more offset to those new triple clamps did the trick, delivering 45 degrees of steering lock in each direction, but at the expense of reducing trail, which the 19 inch wheels carrying oval-track race rubber now fitted to replace the 17 inch original front (and 16 inch rear), nicely compensated for.

RSD also discarded the original carbon fibre subframe, and fabricated a replacement from 4130 chrome-moly tubular steel, on which is mounted the flat-track styled seat, tail section and three-gallon fuel tank all created in aluminium using an authentic such seat that was lying around as a model, while retaining the original tank’s base which also comprises the top of the airbox.

Unlike the original Desmosedici RR, which employed a fat conventional twin-sided swingarm born of its MotoGP daddy’s need to handle the grip delivered by slick tyres, Roland decided the Desmo Tracker should have a trademark Ducati single-sided item, especially with the much skinnier 19 inch Goodyear dirt-oval race tyres fitted (badged as Dunlop, which now owns Goodyear) that have been around for years, mounted to equally long-lived Performance Machine cast aluminium dirt track wheels.

Together with the altered steering geometry, this results in a 40mm longer wheelbase than the stock RR’s original 1430mm stride, though the extra leverage from the wide, taper-section Renthal dirt-track handlebar mounted on three-inch/75mm risers incorporated in the specially machined RSD upper tripleclamp, takes care of any extra steering effort this might create. The wider of the choice of two head angles (23.5º or 24.5º) for the revalved MotoGP-spec Öhlins forks which the stock Desmosedici RR frame offers has been chosen here, while the new swingarm employs the original Desmosedici RR linkage operating the stock Öhlins shock, suitably adjusted for damping and ride height.

With the Tracker a lot lighter than the original bike once all the bodywork etc. had been jettisoned – Roland reckons it scales around 25lb less at 350lb (159kg), though he hasn’t weighed it yet – it’s been possible to remove one of the RR’s original twin 320mm front discs (real dirt-trackers don’t have any front brakes, of course), leaving just its companion mounted on the left, gripped by the original Brembo four-piston radial Monobloc caliper.

Cool? Yes. In fact, in a world of so many factory-made options, the Desmo Tracker has it all its own way.

Words: Alan Cathcart  Photography: Kevin Wing