Italian motorcycle maker Ducati has always pushed the boundaries of street-legal performance motorcycles, but a new era began in the 1980s with the introduction of the 851, what many consider to be the start of the “modern era” of road legal Ducati superbikes based on actual racing machines.
While Ducati had been making well-received (if somewhat temperamental) air-cooled performance bikes such as the 750 F1, the revolution in motorcycle design and engineering in the early 1980s, led by groundbreaking machines like Honda’s liquid-cooled V4 Interceptor machines, Suzuki’s track-focused GSX-R models and Kawasaki’s iconic Ninja inline-four sport bikes, were making once-exotic Ducati models look both old and
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