Ducati Turned 100 This Week — And Marked It With Bulega Beating a Field of MotoGP Stars
World Ducati Week's centennial edition at Misano paired a night-long birthday celebration with the closest thing motorcycle racing has to an all-star game, ridden entirely on identical factory Panigales.
Ducati closed out its 100th year with the biggest World Ducati Week in the event's history: three days, July 3–5, at Misano World Circuit Marco Simoncelli, timed so that July 4 — the exact date the Bologna manufacturer was founded in 1926 — fell in the middle of the weekend. The 13th edition of WDW built its schedule around that anniversary, opening with a Friday parade of Ducatisti and a beach party at Riccione's Samsara Beach Club, then marking the founding date itself with "Live the Legend Night," a stadium show narrated by Francesco Pannofino with live music from Poggipollini.
The weekend's competitive centerpiece was Sunday's Lenovo Race of Champions, a 10-lap sprint that put MotoGP, WorldSBK, and other series' stars on identical Ducati Panigale V4 R Tricolore machines. Nicolò Bulega, Ducati's factory WorldSBK rider, led from start to finish and held off Alberto Surra by 1.4 seconds, with Lorenzo Baldassarri completing the podium. MotoGP world champion Francesco Bagnaia finished fifth and Marc Márquez twelfth, in a field that also included Franco Morbidelli, Fabio Di Giannantonio, and Tommy Bridewell; Michele Pirro and Álvaro Bautista were the only two who didn't finish.
Ducati used the same weekend to preview its next Supermoto homologation special, the Desmo450 SM — a 449.6cc desmodromic single sharing its aluminum perimeter frame and bodywork with the rest of the Desmo450 range, built to qualify for the Supermoto World Championship's S1GP class with Brembo calipers, Galfer discs, and Showa suspension. Full specs and pricing won't land until September, with European deliveries following in October. It's a smaller announcement than the anniversary celebration around it, but a fitting one for a company spending its 100th year putting on both a birthday party and a spec-sheet — proof, in the same weekend, of both where it's been and what's still coming.
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