How the 1098 saved Ducati

In 1995, while Carl Fogarty was ripping up the world’s circuits on the 916 and winning his second WSB championship in a row, Ducati was in the shit. Ailing companies within the Castaglioni group, the then current owners, were sucking money from Ducati and a year later American venture capitalists Texas Pacific Group waded in with a load of cash and saved the day. With fresh investment and new managers Ducati started to earn money again. Now jump forward 10 years to December 2005, only a month after the Desmosedici RR was unveiled, and the major shareholding was transferred to Italian investment company Investindustrial. With an amazing new roadbike on its way and the company back in Italian hands, from the outside everything looked rosy at Ducati.

Except that it wasn’t rosy. Far from it. Ducati was going through one of its bleakest periods ever. In September 2006 they announced a loss for the year of £3.2m and worse still, an incredible debt of £32.5m. It seemed that the fat lady was warming up for a big Italian-style funeral. But then just one year later in 2007, Ducati posted its part-year results in September. You wouldn’t believe the numbers came from the same company. Instead of a £3.2m loss Ducati made a net profit of £12.2m from sales of £224.2m, up a whopping 44% on the previous year. What’s more, Ducati’s managers could now walk past the bank without wearing heavy disguise because from being deeply in the red the company now had £6.6m in its account. How did this incredible turn around in fortunes come about? One principal reason: the new 1098 superbike.

“It was pretty desperate then,” explains journalist and industry expert Roger Willis. “Workers were laid off for a couple of months at the end of 2006 which caused knock-on problems with the unions. New bikes were running off the production lines and gathering dust in dealerships, and the dealers in turn were put under pressure to keep a stock of new bikes that just weren’t attracting customers.” Ducati had to cut production, just as Harley-Davidson has recently had to do. It’s called the economics of supply and demand. “Ducati wouldn’t have gone bust and disappeared,” says Willis, “it’s such an iconic company that the banks or the Italian government would have eventually stepped in.”

Why was the maker of some of the world’s sexiest bikes so deep in the fertiliser? Well for starters Ducati’s flagship superbike at the time wasn’t very sexy: the 999. It may have been more comfortable than the previously iconic 996 and easier to ride fast, but it looked bad. Sales were feeble and dealers had unsold 999s sitting around like museum exhibits. The Multistrada was a niche model and didn’t have buyers beating down dealer doors, while the evergreen Monster had been spread thin with too many different model variants, and sales were down 20% that year. Ducati needed a two-wheeled saviour, and it was around the corner in the shape of the 1098.

Claudio Domenicali, Ducati’s boss in charge of all current and future models, admits that things were well out of shape before the 1098 came along. “Sure, the company was not doing well in ‘06,” he admits. “But the turnaround in 2007 did not come overnight, even though perhaps it looks that way from the outside! We started planning a new strategy in late 2004 and the first thing we all agreed upon was that a Ducati must look breathtaking. You should open your garage and always be taken aback at the sight of your Ducati. We can’t afford to make a badly designed bike. Other manufacturers might be able to get away with it but we can’t,” he admits. And so gorgeous bodywork was part of the 1098’s design brief from day one.

“Since the 1098 we’ve completely changed the way we design bikes,” continues Domenicali. “Two years ago we opened a design studio at the factory with all the equipment that you need including clay modelling facilities. In the past all Ducatis were designed outside of the factory, which can present certain problems as engineers and designers have different requirements.” Something else has recently changed in Ducati’s design department: Pierre Terreblanche has vacated the premises. Terreblanche was the designer who had the unfortunate task of following in the pen strokes of Massimo Tamburini, the Michelangelo designer who penned the iconic 916 and MV’s not-hideous F4. A tough act to follow and Terreblanche, not to put too fine a point on it, failed in his task with the 999. The arrival of the 999 coincided with the Japanese manufacturers raising their game another notch with machines like the Yamaha R1 sexy enough to be Italian. Yamaha and company must have not believed their luck when they saw the 999 and then its sales figures. But not so with this new Ducati.

By the end of September 2007 Ducati had delivered 10,910 of its glorious 1098 to owners worldwide, a staggering 233% more sportsbikes than it sold in the year before. In the UK alone over a thousand 1098s were sold last year – over double the number of Ducati superbikes of all models sold the year before – and don’t forget that the 1098 wasn’t in the showrooms until three months into the year. In one fell swoop, Ducati were back.
What every manufacturer wants is a bike that sells in large numbers but that has a price tag right at the top of the scale. The bean counters must have had a far bigger shock when Ducati released its part-year results last September. One year before the company was sending workers home and worrying about paying the electricity bill. Then due in part to the success of their new superbike, they were in the black.  Ducati owes a lot to the 1098.