"That’s Inappropriate".
You may have heard that a bit.
Perhaps as a comment on someone's poor behaviour.
Well, certainly wouldn't have been yours.
Maybe you heard it about Uncle’s off-colour or badly timed comments at the wedding…something about the colour of the bride's lovely dress matching the kitchen appliances.
So when the idea of turning a Ducati ST4 into a track bike got floated, someone said...
"That’s an inappropriate race bike, right there".
A little background…
A bloke rings wanting some bits for an ST4s. All the shiny plastic bits. Turns out he'd lent it to his son-in-law for a sunny Sunday ride, and 10 minutes later the bike and son-in-law are upside down in a ditch. It’s a wreck. Too scratched to repair, given there’s no insurance.
Here’s a pic of what a tidy ST would look like if not lent to son-in-laws (ours is red of course, with a lot of friction modifications):
We stop by, and eventually decide we’ll buy it for parts.
The ST is the Sensible Tourer of the Ducati range. It’s possible ST means something else in Italian, but Sensible Tourer sums it up.
Upright handlebars, comfy seat, and you can hang sensible panniers on and head up-country for a weekend. Sensible.
We'd always thought that the ST was a Gentleman’s Superbike: a 4-valve motor, same brake callipers, same discs, same rim sizes. Same bore and stroke as the Superbikes, maybe held back a bit by a softer cam. See: Sensible.
Sensible becomes…Inappropriate
Sometimes things conspire against you. It should have just got parted out, keeping other STs on the road for years. However CAMS [link to: https://www.cams-racing.org.nz] bike club had just announced a new Twins race class, and a bloke had just brought a 2000 Aprilia RSV and declared it would "Whip that Ducati’s ass, mate."
So, in the best traditions of "This won't take long and certainly won't cost much", an Inappropriate Race Bike began to take shape.
Because we don't want to be aimlessly wandering through life, we are told to set goals.
Right.
Goal: Build a crashed ST into a track hack. Upright bars, sorted suspension, see if it really is a Gentleman’s Superbike.
Or if it’s just “Inappropriate”.
