Grumpy old man mode for a moment, if you'll indulge me.
All these wings remind me of that era not long after the turn of the millennium when all the luxury car makers were desperate to squeeze some F1 design into their cars. The Ferrari Enzo and Merc/Mac SLR come to mind with their hideous vestigial pointy noses and front wings, all of which the marketing department was keen to say made the car faster on the track. In reality, they're ugly and detract from the car (and motorcycle) as a design.
The only scenario where these wings make even the smallest difference to the riding experience is for a select few very skilled riders on the track, and in that case (e.g. where hundredths of a second per lap matter) you'd want track fairings rather than green masking tape on your fancy headlights and carting around all those heavy and expensive LED assemblies. Otherwise they're about as meaningful as the mega wings bolted to the back of STI's and Toyota Supras.
This isn't just a Ducati thing, Aprilia and BMW are equally guilty in my eyes, to be clear.
New one has the larger TFT with more info and has that logger where you can analyze lap times, sectors, and all your inputs based on GPS, That is cool tech!
Similarly, if that's the route you want to go, aren't you just building a proper track bike that would be WAY faster? And if so, AND you wanted real datalogging, wouldn't you just get a proper race datalogging setup with screen and handlebar controls?
I get that I'm missing the point with the fantasyland aspect attached to these bikes (which, to be fair, isn't that far from the 'traversing Siberia' dream attached to a big GS), but I think about this class of bike in terms of how it will age, either into a classic or just old. Nobody gives a crap anymore about the display/clocks on a 916, or what kind of PGM-FI was installed in an RC45, at least not in terms of whether they'd buy one or not. They care about how they look, how they sound, and how it makes you feel to ride one.
I know it's just because I'm old, but modern sportbikes leave me dead cold. To me, they've obsessed so much about pure performance (largely via electronics at this point) that they've lost sight of the design-first sex appeal, and this is part of the reason why barely anyone buys them anymore. Or maybe the best designs are already done, and the basic shape of a sportbike can't be improved upon, so the inevitable changes just end up making things worse. That's definitely true in my mind, anyway.
Grouch over. I'm off to read my copies of Performance Bike magazine from 2005 and dream of simpler times...
