Ducati Monster 1200s Review

Sponsored by McCann's. Getting you back on two wheels when it wasn't your fault. So we're days away from July. The sun's shining here on the A24. I'm not in Monaco as Mufka was when he rode this Monster 1200S on the press launch back in 2017. What we've done is reacquainted ourselves with this bike. We've lived with it properly in the real world where you guys live rather than out there in sunny, spoiled, journal press launch land. So one of the more common questions we get when we post our new bike reviews from press launches is exactly what does this bike feel like to live with in the real world? And obviously we can't answer those kinds of questions. Just to fill in the gaps, just in case you aren't already aware, a press bike launch works like this. What happens is, let's pick a day of the week. Let's go for Tuesday. You'll go to the airport on a Tuesday, jump on a flight somewhere sunny, arrive quite late, have something to eat, go to bed. Wednesday morning, you get your press presentation. They'll give you the basic specifications of the bike. They'll talk you through the model history, the evolution of that model in particular and any huge step changes that have been made to it. And then you go and jump on them. You'll spend all day on the Wednesday riding it. And then if you're lucky, you'll get some time on the bike on the Thursday and then you'll ride home Thursday afternoon. That's how press bike launches work. Now, we can give you basic information. I can give you my opinion of the bike based on my experience of that model in particular and all of the other bikes that it might be competing against. But it's really hard to get under the skin of these things when you've only got a couple of days really. You can enjoy them. You can smash the life out of them and ride as fast as you can. That's usually why we do. You've got to push things quite quickly, go as fast as you can, as soon as you can, do everything that you would do on a bike over a couple of months in six or seven hours. That's the reality of doing the job that I do. Now, living with a bike like this for two months like I've had it and doing 750 miles, it's nestled in the garage among other test bikes that I'm riding. So in the last two months, I've done probably three and a half thousand miles. 750 of them have been on this wonderfully weird, I think it's called Liquid Concrete Gray Monster 1200. So I'm not gonna bore you with a history lesson of the Monster, but let's just remind ourselves this bike has been around for 26 years. 1993, 900 came out, 75 horsepower. Italian parts been special would be doing it a real disservice, but in my head, that's kind of what it was. The guy that designed it, Miguel Galluzzi, had this vision in his head of being a slightly drag racing inspired street bike that could do most things that sports bikes can do. And here we are 26 years later and I think that same original ethos still applies, but we've jumped from 75 horsepower back then to 150 horsepower now. The power on this bike has doubled and along the way, if you pick a big, fast, leery kind of iconic super bike from Ducati, let's go for the 998R, that's a bike that makes less power and torque than this and it only weighs a kilo less. So if you've been into bikes for years and years and you remember that 998R as being all singing, all dancing, smash everything, beautiful kind of sexy sports bike from Italy, it's not as fast. It doesn't make as much power as this, you could call it bland gray commuter bike. You'd have to really squint to call this a bland gray commuter bike, but effectively, that's kind of what it is. So one of the first questions we get asked is what are these bikes like with a pillion? Obviously on a press launch, you can't really do that. I might drag a cameraman up and down the road for a couple of hundred meters, but that doesn't really paint a big enough picture for me to form an opinion. Now, in my house at home, I have four daughters. All of them love bikes and three of the four are big enough and old enough to sit on the back of these things. So I've done across town, I've done bike shed runs just to go and watch MotoGP with my 13 year old. I've done school runs with my 15 year old. They've all had a go on the back of this bike and none of them have any complaints. What's important to caveat here is none of them are adult sized at the same time. So if your pillion is a child or it's your wife or husband and they're tiny, let's say five foot five, five foot six max and no more than 10 or 11 stone, they're gonna fit on the back of this bike and you aren't really gonna notice that they're on there at all. The pillion box for me gets a tick, but my pillions in particular are all tiny. If yours are not, again, I can't answer your question. Another interesting point that I've found on press launches is we usually end up reporting on pretty poor economy. Mostly because, like I said at the start of this piece, you get on them and your aim is to go fast sooner rather than later so you end up burning more fuel than you would in the real world. And again, living with this bike has given me a chance to knock the edges off and just ride normally as you would day to day and after 750 miles, my average consumption on Monster 1200 S has been 46.6 miles to the gallon. That's a combination of all kinds of riding. I'm gonna say predominantly city riding because every single ride that I do starts and finishes with South Circular madness and fighting my way out of town. But I've done a couple of big trips. I took a couple of days, no cameras, just a bag, shot off on my own, went down to the south coast from London, along to Dorset, stopped in Bridport and then rode up from Dorset to Barnstable on the north coast of Devon, did the 377 through Crediton. If you don't know that road, stick a pin in the map on it and go and do it one day. It's a beauty. And so motorways, A roads, B roads, fast and slow, congested, quiet, every single kind of environment you could possibly hope to find on a ride and it was dry the whole time I was away. It was a beauty of a ride. So like every review that I do, they're unscripted. This is off the top of my head. I'm not about to hold up a piece of paper and use it as reference to puke the press pack numbers at you. We've already discussed how much more power it makes than the original, how much more power it makes than a sweet 998 R. What I'm here to tell you is that I've spent pretty much all of my time in sport mode of the three that you can choose from. I've had the traction control set on level three. There are other levels of traction control that you can go for. I can't remember how many there are, but three is the one that works for me. The ABS is set on level two and I've turned the wheelie control off because wheelies. The great thing about being told I have to live with a Monster 1200 is I've got this nerdy encyclopedic reference in my head of pretty much every other Monster that's ever been made that I've ridden. For me, Monster changed for the better back in 2013 when 1100 Evo was launched. That was the kind of last of the old school Desmodue air-cooled Monster, large capacity Monsters. After that, things started getting a lot sharper, a lot more sporting focus, rather than that kind of pitch at commuters and little bits of do everything. Every Monster that you've been able to buy from 2014 or 15 upwards has had top spec suspension available like this one, like the Brembos that are on this. You can have super bike quality parts fitted to a naked upright riding style like this has. I quite like the fact that first thing in the morning, Monster 1200 is quite a cantankerous old bastard. Much like me, it needs an espresso in a couple of minutes and maybe a cigarette. Mull the day over before you jump in and get things going. If you just leap on this bike and bang the clutch out and try and ride off down the road, it's quite cold and grabby, that clutch. It needs a couple of minutes to warm up and get into the swing of things. Ditto the fueling. I don't know why, and it's no bad thing. For me, I quite like it. It feels like the bike has a bit of character and a bit of soul. It's impossible to make something made of metal have soul, but this does feel like there's something going on in there that you need to get on with. There's a relationship that you have with this bike. If you push it too hard, too early in the morning, it's gonna push back and just not do what you want it to. Once it's warm, though, the thing comes to life. I actually let a couple of friends have a go on this bike that the producer doesn't know, and this is me admitting it for the first time, and I tried to give them a little bit of a brief, and the brief was, it's got loads of torque and it makes loads of power at the top. If you wanna go fast, just hang on to a gear. The smiles on their faces when they came back told me that they enjoyed riding it, and also, one of the things that I'd maybe forgotten and we should talk about now is just how easy this bike is to ride. It's got so much torque, and like I say, once it's warm, it's so easy to get at. It fuels very cleanly. It just goes about its business. You'd be hard-pushed to tell that this bike makes 150 horsepower if you never really revved it any more than halfway through the rev range. Once you get up there, though, it absolutely flies. It's a rod of a bike. It makes you feel cool. It goes really fast. That seamless quickshifter works on the way up, I think, better than it does on the way down, so I can almost trick the quickshifter into replicating the mistakes that I've made with other Ducati quickshift systems, and it simply comes down to the pressure of the prod and the length of the prod, the amount of time you leave your foot on the gear lever. It only seems to happen when I'm coming down the gearbox. From third down to second, throttle closed, carrying a little bit of front brake is fine, but if you just roll the gas off and you're not really using the brake and you're just mincing your way down the gearbox, if you leave your foot on the gear lever for too long, it does this weird kind of lurchy thing, wakes you up, gives you a little bit of a jolt. It's not a particularly nice feeling, so the way around it is just to get your eye in with it. Have a little stab on the gear lever, and you'll quickly find out how much is not enough because you simply won't change down a gear. When you get it right, it really is exactly what it says. It's seamless. If you get it wrong, it'll piss you off. It still pisses me off every now and then, but I'm starting to get my head around it, and I've realised that it's more a John issue than a Ducati one. The one thing that I haven't done, I can't tip the track day box. I just haven't had the time to go and do one. I think if I was living in that world where I was thinking about track days on my Monster 1200, I'd possibly consider, particularly at this time of the year, upgrading from a Diablo Rosso III to a Super Corsa or some shiny, stickier tyre than the one that it's got, but for everyday road riding, it's pissed it down. You know, I've done long days on the motorway. This tyre is more than up to the job of doing what this bike can do for you. I can't talk about servicing because, to Ducati's credit, the service schedules on this bike now are thousands and thousands of miles apart. I think it's 10,000 miles before you change the oil, and I think it's 15,000 miles before you need to do any kind of valve clearances or anything like that, so 750 miles is barely touching the sides when it comes to service schedules on this bike. So another question that we get asked is, would you buy one with your own money? I think the short answer is yes. This does pretty much everything that I'm looking for in my motorcycle. Now, a lot of the stuff that I do involves rolling through the middle of central London and pulling up to places like the bike shed. If I wear one of my weird open-face helmets and some really shady sunglasses, I fit into that crowd quite easily on this bike. Ditto the fast group track day crowd at Brands Hatch. I'd have absolutely no problem sticking my leathers on and flying down to Brands and kind of holding my own in the fast group on a bike like this. So for me, it's doing most of the things that I look for in a motorbike. Everybody else that I've let have a go on it and everyone else that's ridden it that I know and value their opinion would also have one. You'd be surprised how hard it is to say liquid concrete grey to a camera without sounding like a complete idiot. It took quite a few goes. That's the exact colour that I would have mine. I think I would probably stick some loud pipes on it just because it feels like quite a big and brutish Ducati, and I think if you're gonna have one of those kinds of bikes, it needs to make a particular kind of sound. This pops and bangs on the overrun. It does all the right noises, they're just not quite loud enough, and a set of Termis or any other decent exhaust would really bring that sound to life. So the great thing about these Living With Reviews is the chance for us all to contribute to them. The comment sections on YouTube now are not quite the minefield that they used to be. You can find some great tips and some great information. So if you've got a Monster 1200 and you've lived with yours and you've got something to add, bang it in the comment section, share it with the crowd, share the love. Sponsored by McCams, getting you back on two wheels when it wasn't your fault.