A screen grab purported to be from Ducati's own website appears to show power and torque figures for a forthcoming 'Streetfighter Evo SP” with the 1198cc engine from the firm's current superbike.
The dyno graph in the grab – posted on the www.ducati.ms forum by a user who claims the web page was briefly put on line before reverting back to the 2011-spec Streetfighter S page – is identical to that of the 1198, with a peak power of 170bhp. The name at the top of the page seems to confirm the “Evo SP” tag for the bike.
But while it's completely believable that Ducati will make a Streetfighter with the 1198 engine, and that it will carry over the “Evo” and “SP” tags that its recently been using elsewhere in its range, we're not convinced that the screen grab used to 'prove' the bike's existence is real.
Why not? Because it would be all too easy to fake it. As mentioned, the power graph is identical to that already on the 1198 page on Ducati's site. The “Evo SP” part of the bike's name could easily have been cut and pasted from the Hypermotard Evo SP's page. But most damning is the text box alongside the graph; the first part of the sentence comes straight from the 1198's page. The second part – after the unusually-spaced comma – is taken from the existing Streetfighter page. Even the line breaks are identical. The only text change is that the numbers '1098' have been changed to '1198'.
Of course, it may be that the page is real, and Ducati did accidentally let it go online briefly – after all, the 1198 engine is a direct fit for the Streetfighter and a logical next step for that bike.
We'd bank on just such a bike being launched in the next year or so. But our guess is that in this instance, somebody has been playing with Photoshop.
