In love with a Lasagne bike

I am fortunate. I regularly get a selection of amazing cars and bikes delivered for me to try out. You know, people call and say: “Hey, Jay, why don’t you try this and see how you like it?” My wife calls them drug dealers.

Last week I got the new Ducati Desmosedici RR delivered for a shoot on my website (jaylenosgarage.com). It’s hard to justify spending $77,500 on a bike that you can’t pronounce properly. It’s like how people always stop me in the street and say: “Hey, I’d like to buy one of those Brough Superiors? But is it pronounced Bro or Brow?”

And with the Desmosedici, I mean I feel I should say Catalini or Lasagne – it would just be easier to say. So when I show this bike to people I’m tripping over the words. It’s like when the movie The Shawshank Redemption came out and I found myself saying: “Have you seen the Sheepshank Reduction? Have you seen the Sheepdip Resolution?”

It’s amazing to ride a motor vehicle that the average person like me could never, ever, possibly find the limits to. I mean, it revs to 14000rpm; it’s 197bhp; it’s 377lb. I took it for a ride out on the freeway and within seconds it was doing 150mph. Not km. Miles per hour! And then I hit the brake and, Jeez, it stopped up, like, now, and you say to yourself: “What do you do with something like this?”

I walked round this Ducati saying: “How do you justify this price?” Because to the average person it doesn’t look any different from an $8,000 motorcycle.

But as you study it closer and closer, your eye falls to the little hand-fettled footpeg, the little carbon fibre piece protecting the hydraulic brake reservoir, the cassette-type gearbox, which literally just clicks as you touch the gearchanger.

It’s rather clichéd to talk about soul but you know, some guitars have it; some don’t. Some musicians have it; some don’t. Some art has it; some doesn’t. And some motorcycles have it and some don’t. And this definitely has it. The more you ride it and the more it clicks in, you are really recreating what these MotoGP guys are riding. I mean, the bike is only 45lb or 50lb heavier than the actual bike that they race because it has lights and turning signals and things of that nature but everything’s almost exactly the same. It’s nearly 200bhp and even though $77,500 is a crazy amount of money for a motorcycle (in the UK it will cost you £40,000), you cannot duplicate the sensation in the automobile world for less than $1m.

This is the equivalent of driving a McLaren F1 and there’s really nothing faster in the world if you know what you’re doing. But even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you know I’ve probably used this analogy before, but it’s like having sex with an aerobics instructor – you know, I’m exhausted and panting and this thing’s going: “Are you done, already?”

You know, I’m very tempted to get one. The last Ducati I bought new I still have. I bought it in 1985. It was a Hailwood replica because Mike Hailwood was one of my heroes. That was the last chance you got for a bike that was exactly like the one Mike rode. It was a pretty amazing motorcycle. I have not bought a Ducati in 23 years so maybe it’s about time for a new one.