If you thought all we were getting from Ducati to celebrate its 100th anniversary was the Superleggera V4 Centenario and a coffee maker, think again. When you have a history as storied as Ducati's, not showing it off on your Centenario would be an injustice to the motorcycle community. But, in a similar fashion, when you have a history spanning 10 decades, how do you pick what to highlight when you only have one opportunity?
Ducati found a way, but it wasn't easy.
To celebrate Ducati's 10 decades, the Borgo Panigale brand chose 10 models to turn into limited-edition masterpieces of design and storytelling. Each edition of the Centenario lineup celebrates a specific bike from the Italian brand's history, and each model is limited to just 100 units.
The whole project came about when Ducati staff were organizing the brand's archives. Coming face-to-face with the bikes that were most impactful in growing the brand gave birth to the idea for this project: Match an iconic motorcycle from Ducati's past to one currently in production. There was just one problem.
Some of Ducati's most important bikes wouldn't be recognized if you simply took their liveries and put them on the modern Ducati range. Take the 916—one of the most iconic motorcycles of all time—if you put that livery on a Panigale V4 S, it'd kind of just look like a regular Panigale with a splash of white and a gold frame.
So, not only did the managers of this project need to find models that propelled the brand forward, but they also had to have extremely distinctive liveries. Once those parameters were set, the project managers and executives had to whittle the list down from 200 possible bikes to just 10.
The final problem lay in matching the most iconic bikes from the brand's past to current models that embody that energy. Let's just say the Scrambler isn't a fitting canvas to represent the Imola 750 Desmo, but to find out what is, you'll need to watch the video.
