Whilst my natural inclination with a new bike is to start fiddling with its setup pretty much on the way out of the dealers, with The Raven I’ve been giving myself time to slowly get used to it, to play with the various suspension modes and generally suss it out until I understand it enough to start prodding at it. That does however assume that Ducati have pretty much got everything right to the point where, whilst I might want to tweak to taste, there’s nothing I can’t live with. So time to look at the figures.
The graphs below show the electronically adjustable bits of the system and the stock settings for each mode and load (for the Preload settings, the higher the number the greater the preload and, for damping, the higher the number the ‘lower’ the damping effect). Whilst there’s a mostly logical progression – increasing rear preload and commensurate increases, particularly to rebound damping as the load rises, there are a few anomalies in various modes that I’m still trying to work out. Also, rear damping is jumped right up in Two-Up+load in Sport mode – a bigger difference between any other mode and we’re finding that Touring mode is generally a little undersprung and damped and Sport mode slightly overdamped. I’ve a feeling that the rear shock might need respringing – I probably weigh a tad more than the target Italian norm…
I just put a bit over 1000 miles on my 1200 ABS. For being just this base model, fully adjustable ssouenpisn, ABS, traction control, gobs of power, three engine maps with four memory slots for mapping and traction control, bigger tank range, underseat storage, tons of info on the dash, keyless ignition, and a cooler running engine on the street has already been an impressive upgrade over my old 2010 hyper 796 (RIP). Stop-and-go mileage sucks, though. I may consider a trade-in after a year or two. It was a hard sell to for the old lady to allow this one.