FEBRUARY 2, 2014
This is a little personal project I did in 2003 for the “Design your Dream Ducati” Contest.This is an example of Ducati doing “crowd sourcing” before it became hip. Over a 1000 entries were submitted from all over the world at the cost of only two motorcycles. Okay, so on to my entry….
The SST is a Super Sport Touring bike. The idea being that you could ride it at the track by easily removing the side mirrors with integrated turn singles, quickly drop the clamp-ons below the shock’s top clamp and raise the rear set up under the seat. Then you could revert it back and comfortably ride the bike on your favorite set of road twisties for a few hours.
I challenged myself to style the bike in a very clean and graphic manner. I split the windscreen down the middle but ran it clean around the bottom of front fairing giving it a vertical layout . In contrast most sports bikes at this time had a horizontal layout of intakes and headlights. The SST headlights were hidden behind the windscreen to keep the lines clean. The air intake was put at the very front center of the fairing to grab the air before it was disturbed by running across any body surfaces. The side fairings are kept clean, like the 999, not junked up with a bunch of gratuitous styling elements like most other sportsbikes.
To run the air the from the front intake straight into the airbox I had to change the design of the normal center steering tube. Instead I created two very large being races for the steering to work from and then connected the top and bottom with support framing on the side. This allows the air ducting to run straight through the axes of the steering and into the airbox without any bends. The ducting can be faintly seen through the large steering ring. Had this been a cruiser or chopper bike I would have put the RPM gauge in the the ring but to keep it and the over lapping speedometer easily visible I placed them in the normal position.
Another difference from most sportsbikes is the shape of the front fairing. In top view you can see that it tappers off to the sides more than most designs to divert air flow around to the sides of the rider. Not all air goes around but it reduces the amount of air being directed straight up into the rider’s chest and head, reducing drag and wind buffeting.
The modeling and render for this project was all done in Alias.
