Domestic bliss – At home with the Ducati Multistrada Enduro

This entry is part 12 of 18 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #18

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Last issue we’d ridden the Ducati Multistrada Enduro in Europe and loved it. We said we needed to ride the bike in Australia before we could be confident of our assessment. Now we’ve ridden it here and it’s every bit as good as we thought. Maybe even better.

Australia is a unique continent in lots of ways. We have beaut animals and insects that can be lethal to foreigners if they just look at them, and to most of the rest of the world, the distance some of us travel on a weekend ride would have them needing passports and an interpreter.Another unique thing about Australia is the harsh environment. For adventure riders that’s mostly heat and dust, and the problem with other countries not understanding conditions here is that they make bikes that don’t last a day when, by Australian standards, it’s ‘a bit dusty’ or ‘frigging hot’.

That little waffle is to set the scene for our ride of the Ducati Multistrada Enduro here in good ol’ Aus.

We covered the technical ins and outs of this bike in issue #17. There are a lot of them, and compared to what we’re used to they’re very advanced. We suspect the high-performance road-bike guys are probably familiar with some of the systems on the Multistrada Enduro, but for us they’re high-end and exotic, and we tried to outline them on our first ride.

So now we’re going to give seat-of-the-pants impressions of riding the bike in our own back yard. Grab last issue for tech. This issue we’re going to be a little airy-fairy and talk about our ‘feelings’.

No limits

When we rode the bike in Europe we were impressed, but we’d been kept behind lead riders, coached in what settings to select and even given a lecture on how to ride off-road. In Australia the Ducati folks placed no limits at all on us. They grabbed a truck full of bikes, a planeload of moto-journos, and let them loose on the NSW mid north coast.

Dust ready

Enough gibber. How did we feel about the Multistrada Enduro?

Pretty damn hairy-knuckled and full of testosterone, that’s how.

We didn’t hit any deep water or extreme heat, but we saw enough dust to satisfy us. The Ducati very likely has its air intake well sorted and is dust-free.

Not only that, as we write this Ducati is within an ace of having a foam filter available, made here in Australia, to replace the stock paper filter. That’ll be a big bonus to those of us who like to take a spare oiled filter or two in a plastic bag when we head out on a long ride.

Performance enhanced

We managed some reasonable time on the bitumen and in Sport mode the Enduro hardens up – quite literally.

The suspension becomes noticeably firmer, the engine is set free to deliver its full 160 pants-creaming horsepower, and the ABS, traction control and other systems are configured to deliver best lap times.

And doesn’t this bike deliver.

Holy screaming-in-our-helmets, Batman!

On the mountain roads with the subtropical palms and ferns providing a radar-proof canopy – we hoped – the Multistrada Enduro made us feel like superstars. The smooth, slightly ferocious power delivery was kept under control by the electronics, and the incredibly comfortable geometry meant terrifying corners were negotiated at seemingly impossible speeds with smooth, fast, safe attitudes we know for a fact should’ve been well beyond us.

We know for a fact because we flicked over to the Enduro mode and had a bit of a fang on the bitumen to see how we’d go. We figured with the engine limited to 100 horsepower we could cope with less help from the on-board systems. The Enduro mode allows a little rear-wheel spinning and locking. We sort of coped. In the split second that separates good riders from the rest the whole thing went all Iannone – look him up – on us, and with a rather large stain in our jocks we called it a gypsy’s warning and backed off.

We were right. We can’t ride that fast. But in Sport mode were doing it, and doing it with relative ease.

We have to ’fess up to ‘the moment’ because, like the true professional photographer he is, Greg Smith of iKapture was hiding behind a bush and managed to photograph our experiment.

The Multistrada Enduro was making us look way, way better riders than we actually were.

Off road

The off-road sections made up about 90 per cent of the ride, and a mix of hard-packed forest roads, rocky trails, sand wallows and the occasional shallow water crossing had us revelling in the bike’s obvious suitability for the terrain. It swooped, slid, jumped and rorted its way through every challenge, always feeling it wasn’t really challenged at all, and always making us feel far more confident than we thought was right… except, the faster we went and the more confident we felt, the more the bike rewarded us.

The suspension surprised us the most. It won’t cop being jumped off erosion mounds or being pancaked into G-outs, but we think that’s fair enough. A 1200cc ‘maxi enduro’ – Ducati’s description – isn’t designed for that kind of treatment. To be fair, we were impressed with the way the bike handled that kind of abuse, but still, it’s clearly outside its design parameters. Hurling the bike at rocky slopes and shallow sand sections had our eyebrows shooting way up in our helmets. The stability of the bike was a big surprise for us. It tracked straight in what we knew to be some very shitty terrain. We knew that because we’d ridden these same sections on plenty of other bikes.

The bad news

The bad news is…well, there isn’t any, really.

Our rear tyre was very second-hand after about 300km, but we freely admit we made no attempt whatsoever to look after it. Anyone who buys a 1200cc bike of any kind has to be ready for short rear-tyre life.

One of the media bikes holed a radiator right near the end of the ride, underlining the wisdom of the Enduro Pack for those heading off road, and one of the bikes went down in the rocks and showed the benefits of the aluminium protective side panels. Other than that there were no problems and there were no DNFs.

Summing up

We’re really keen on the Ducati Multistrada Enduro.

It’s a smooth, high-performance, long-distance tourer that’s very capable off-road. It’s in a tough market, up against bikes like the big BMWs and KTMs, the Aprilia Caponord, Triumph’s Explorer and maybe Yamaha’s Super T and Suzuki’s big V-Strom, depending how you look at it. That’s a bullring of very serious, hard-fighting competitors.

For out-and-out big-dualsport performance we’re pretty sure the Ducati will hold its own in any company, on or off road, in Europe, Australia or anywhere else.