2017 DUCATI DESERT SLED
DUCATI HAVE GONE BEYOND PURELY RETRO STYLE TO GIVE IS A SCRAMBLER THAT ACTUALLY IS OFFROAD ORIENTED
The bike world is awash with retro styling these days and whilst some of these are muted and modernised versions that the cool crowd ride chasing past dreams Ducati have come up with the Desert Sled based on their popular Scrambler.
When Ducati launched the Scrambler in 2014 it was a massive PR and sales success for the Italian company. The brief for the Desert Sled was simple. Take the Scrambler, keep the general styling and lifestyle but make it more offroad capable.
Now, if you're going to call your bike a Desert Sled, harking back to the lifestyling of ripping through Southern California's deserts on customised street bikes and the first dirt bikes, you better make sure it can be taken in the desert and survive.
First problem, there aren't many deserts in Scotland. We're not weather of geology experts but we'd guess that it might just rain a bit too much here for deserts to form. That's not an expert opinion, just a passing comment based on how wet we got riding in to work today. If we’d set up a water collection systems on ourselves we could probably irrigate a small country in Africa for a month in what we’d collect riding the 45 to work. But we still love it.
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