Ride Review: 2012 Ducati Diavel

It's not often that I'll jump on a bike, take off on a test ride, go "whee, whee, whee!" and want to ride it all the way home. That was the case with the 2012 Ducati Diavel, the Italian motorcycle maker's take on the cruiser genre. I had the opportunity to stop by Touring Sport in Greenville, SC, one of the sponsors for this year's Women On Wheels® International Ride-In, to test ride this exotic beast.

With the modern, avant-garde styling of the Diavel, it's pretty difficult for me to even consider it to be a "cruiser" despite its designation by Ducati. It has the huge rear tire of a custom cruiser, the upright posture of a naked bike, and the ridiculous power of a sportbike with an innovative computer system to boot. When I threw a leg over this machine, its ergonomics had me thinking that I was on a low-slung Monster rather than the stereotypical laid-back posture of a standard cruiser. The foot controls were so upright, in fact, that I thought I was in an office chair with handlebars! And I could even stand up straight on the pegs!

Getting ready to rip the pavement on one sleek Duc!

Motorcycle foot controls on cruisers - ergonomics do matter.

I can't sleep, so you're going to hear all about it.

If you recall from my blog entry a few weeks ago, I was dealing with a problem in my right foot which I assumed to be either a heel spur, plantar faciitis, or a heel bruise. The pain was so excruciating that I had to use crutches for a week and sit out four hockey games as well as the gym as I couldn't put any weight on that foot. Although that didn't stop me from riding the motorcycle, it did make navigating the store during high volumes of customer traffic a bit challenging at times.

When trying to investigate what started the pain in the first place, I narrowed it to one activity that I was performing when my foot became aggravated: I was riding a loaner cruiser from the motorcycle store (a 2006 Yamaha Royal Star Midnight Tour Deluxe to be exact) with forward controls.

Because of my height and inseam (5'5.5"/29.5 in.), forward controls (which, in non-motorcyclist speak, are defined as the footpegs/floorboards, shift, and brake lever placed so the legs are stretched in front of rider) can be difficult on bigger cruisers that are designed for taller people. In some test rides, I have been known to completely move my body from one side to the other to shift gears (left foot) and to apply the rear brake (right foot). In the case of the aforementioned loaner cruiser I was riding, I had to stretch a little bit to keep my foot on the bike's floorboards. That also contributed to some of the foot pain because the hyperextension of my leg to meet the controls forced the back of my motorcycle boot to press right into my Achilles tendon area. After a 60 mile round trip, I definitely felt that for a while. However, that wasn't what caused the most serious pain; it was the fact that I attempted to compensate for my lack of reach by straightening my entire right leg and resting my heel directly on the floorboard, probably aggravating my plantar fascia (the thick band of tissue that's connected to the heel) in the process.

My day with Barney the Cruiser

I jumped into the world of cruisers today with an interesting companion.

Meet "Barney," a 2005 Honda VTX1300S that I borrowed from work for the weekend until Eleanor is ready to hit the road again. This bike earned this name because of its custom paint job of purple with silver flames. But it's no dinosaur by any means; Honda, along with the other Japanese and European bike makers, has been making cruisers that still possess the styling cues of a classic bike while using modern technology such as water cooling and shaft drive to allow for a smoother ride and extended reliability.

Since I started riding bikes seven years ago I have never spent this much time on large cruiser motorcycle until now. It's been a very interesting experience to say the least...for the first time in my riding career I'm on a bike that's "just like everyone else's."

Here in Ohio (and this part of the country for that matter) cruiser/classic style motorcycles make up the vast majority of the bikes on the road. With Ohio's proximity to Milwaukee, WI, the home of Harley-Davidson, and the demographics of the population out here it's not surprising that the classic American look and style is very popular. In contrast to CA where sportbikes and sport touring machines are far more common for the purpose of weaving in and out of traffic with precision, the Midwest is where the cruiser is king.

Being a sport touring motorcycle rider and an unusually young one at that, I've always found myself as an outsider among the throngs of machines at any given bike night or other related event. When I would ride with Eleanor down the street, the only riders that would wave to me would be touring bikes, sportbikes, and cruisers that felt no need to discriminate against my style of ride. I'm "just another random motorcycle" until I come to a complete stop, either at a gas station or some place on the open road, where curious eyes finally notice me and Eleanor in our strange getup and traveling equipment. (I did try to stand out a little bit from the normal cruiser bike crowd by being one of the very few riders that wore a fully padded jacket, long gauntlet gloves with titanium knuckles, a full face helmet, and riding pants.)

In contrast to my normal motorcycle situation, after being on that Honda VTX1300S and riding through the thoroughfares of Columbus I don't think that I've been waved at while I was on a motorcycle that many times in a single day in my entire life, as if being on this cruiser instantly made me look super cool or someone worth acknowledging. From a distance I was just one of the thousands of cruisers that were on the road on this unusually warm Sunday afternoon in April, and with that paint job I turned heads by what I rode, not where I rode from. The image of me on a cruiser and attracting that much attention by my appearance is one that I can't seem to adopt for myself, but it was fun to spend a day in another rider's shoes and be that "badass" that I can never be on my FJR1300.

This week I am hoping to get Eleanor back on the road again so we can go back to business as usual and throw some more miles on the odometer. I am fortunate to be able to delve into so many avenues of the motorcycle culture. We riders are social case studies in ourselves!