Song of the Sausage Creature by Hunter S. Thompson

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."

"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it... For that we need Fine Machinery.

Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find... I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....

And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."

The 1991–1997 Ducati 900SS Is The Used Motorcycle You Need by Peter Egan

Peter Egan explains why the Ducati 900SS is one of the great used bikes you can buy and enjoy now.

If the 1980s was the age of Disco, then you might say the 1990s was the age of Ducati—at least for those of us who like the music of big-bore Desmo V-twins from Italy.

For me and many of my ­riding friends, the bikes from Borgo Panigale are still perhaps the most enduring and colorful symbol of good times from that decade, as ­remembered through a lens of vibrant red or bright yellow—or maybe even ebony black, over a white trellis frame.

Ducati, of course, turned out an unbroken string of charismatic street- and racebikes in that era, but the one that really took the world by storm was the 900SS, introduced in 1991.

When it appeared on the cover of our July issue that year (“At Last! Italian, Awesome and Affordable!”), you could sense a worldwide barometric-pressure drop from the sharp intake of breath among sportbike fans who were on the brink of buying a modern Ducati but hadn’t quite been sold on the looks or practicality of previous models.

On that cover photo, the new 900SS was leaned over hard to reveal the beautiful lines of its full fairing, which flowed back from the rectangular headlight like red flames from a meteor hitting the atmosphere. Our test rider was, of course, wearing a tricolor Jimmy Adamo replica helmet, just to remind you that Ducati was a rising force in Superbike racing, in case you’d forgotten.

The road test was laudatory and raved about the lightness (414 pounds dry), agility, fine handling, and deep, satisfying torque pumped out by the 904cc air-/oil-cooled Desmo Twin. A pair of Mikuni carbs had eliminated all the flat spots of previous Weber-fed models and—wonder of wonders—the thing was comfortable. The moderately high clip-ons, good seat, and dropped rearsets made this a Ducati you could ride all day. All three editors—Edwards, Canet, and Catterson—gave it the stamp of approval.

It was nice to have my own instincts reinforced because I’d just flown to Italy a few months earlier for a First Ride and had immediately fallen under the bike’s spell.

Our gang of moto-journalists mounted up in a warehouse at the rear of the factory, and by the time we reached the front gate, I flipped up my face shield, turned to Cycle magazine’s then-editor Steve Anderson, and shouted, “I must have one of these!” Steve just smiled and nodded.

After a full day of riding over the Apennines, my enthusiasm remained undiminished. Steve and I had lunch at an outdoor cafe near the Futa Pass and spent most of the hour drinking espressos and silently staring at our bikes in the mountain sunshine. In child development, I believe this is called “imprinting.”

Apparently, I was not imprinting alone; Ducati sold almost 28,000 of these bikes worldwide during their seven-year run, to include the solo-seat Superlight models, half-­fairing CR versions, and silver 1997 Final Editions. By the time I bought my own Supersport (red, full fairing, white frame) in 1992, about half the guys in our motorcycle club had bought one—or were about to. And by the mid-’90s, four out of the six members of our perpetually underrated garage band, the Defenders, owned nearly identical 900 Super Sports. Even the late, famed gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson had one—and wrote an article about it for Cycle World. Some readers loved it, and others thought he was crazy as a bedbug. Imagine that.

In 1996, I sold my ’92 model and bought a new SP (Sport ­Production) version—essentially the same bike but with upgraded brakes, bronze-painted frame and wheels, and a few carbon-fiber bits that lowered the weight a whopping 4 pounds. My buddy Pat Donnelly had one too, and we rode the two bikes out to Sturgis for Bike Week, with duffel bags strapped over the back seats. Thus equipped, they made perfectly comfortable long-­distance touring bikes, but on ­winding roads through the Black Hills, they metamorphosed back into sportbikes of deep finesse, with killer, real-world midrange and light, intuitive handling.

Beyond this functional versatility, the 900SS had a spare, mechanically direct charisma that could probably only have come out of Italy. For less than $9,000, you really could ride something that felt like the two-wheeled equivalent of a Ferrari. In my double life as a car journalist I’d tested quite a few Ferraris, and felt this comparison was not the least bit strained.

Drawbacks to ownership? Not many. The dry clutches were always loud and chattery, the hydraulic slave cylinder for the clutch was short-lived—but easily replaced—and the Desmo valve adjusts were expensive, and generally best left to a skilled mechanic with the right tools and shims. Stock gearing was very tall—to get those booming pipes through a federal noise test—but a countershaft sprocket change (which I did) was a simple and effective cure. The stock rear suspension was a bit stiff over road seams, and the full fairing lowers (essentially two parallel airfoils afflicted with random stall and lift) could be a handful in gusting crosswinds. All rather minor stuff, however, that never diminished my enjoyment of the bike. Some later models suffered frame cracks around the steering head (a recall, and always a good thing to check), but mine never did.

After some time, I finally sold my 900SS to buy a Ducati ST3—and then an ST4S, with luggage—hoping to do more touring, but neither bike was ever as all-day comfortable as the 900SS. Nor was the less-beautiful and versatile ­Terblanche-designed 900 Super Sport that replaced it in 1998—and hence stiffed on the market. Would that I had kept my 1996 SP.

There are others out there, of course, and at very reasonable prices, with $3,500 to $6,500 being the typical range. The reason I know that is I’m always looking at them online. I’ve found that very few bikes that win your heart at first sight lose the capacity to do it again.