With just weeks to go before the world debut of Ducati's all-new 1199 Panigale sports flagship at the Milan motorcycle show in November, the Bologna Boffins have given us a unique look into the heart of the new bike - the world's most powerful production twin-cylinder engine.
Ducati's engine designers were given a blank sheet and encouraged to think outside the box, with the result that two of desmo genius Fabio Taglioni's most cherished engineering ideals have been thrown out of the window in the quest for more power, more user-friendliness, lighter weight and longer service intervals.
Mutually exclusive objectives, one would say.
Apparently not, if you're prepared to go far enough outside the box.
The new engine has been named Superquadro, because of its hugely oversquare engine architecture. It has a cavernous 112mm bore on a stroke of only 60.8mm (that's a bore/stroke ratio of 1.84:1!) for an actual capacity of 1198cc.
Ducati quotes an astonishing 144kW at 10 750 revs and 133Nm at 9000rpm; if that's true the Panigale will be as fast as a BMW S1000RR or Kawasaki ZX-10R on top end and quicker out of corners. No wonder Honda is working on a V4 Fireblade; they're going to need it.
The crankcases are vacuum-cast for optimum rigidity and light weight, and the water jackets for the cylinders are cast into the top of the casings; the bores are nikasil-plated, slip-in aluminium "wet" liners. That not only makes the engine lighter but also eliminates base-gasket leaks and makes the unit more rigid, as the DOHC cylinder heads are bolted directly to the crankcases.
The primary-drive casing, clutch housing and cover, sump and cam covers are all cast in magnesium to add more lightness.
Taglioni's cherished roller-bearing mains are gone in favour of white-metal shell bearings, enabling a increase in main-bearing journal diameter for increased crankshaft rigidity (always a problem with big twins) and more metal around the bearings (Ducati World Superbike crankcases have been known to crack around the main-bearing housings).
The main bearings are force-fed oil through drillings in the bearing pillars and the oil is quickly scavenged back into the sump by a MotoGP-style vacuum pump that keeps crankcase pressure lower than atmospheric to limit pumping losses.
The huge bore (a normal-sized man could easily slip both hands into a Superquadro liner) also makes space for valves like dustbin lids - inlet valve diameter is up from 43.5 to 46.8mm and exhaust size from 34.5 to 38.2mm - which are now titanium instead of stainless steel.
All of which makes Ducati's trademark desmodromic valve system even more vital; valves that size would never be able to follow the cam's closing profile using normal springs.
Precision valve control also led Ducati engineers to replace the toothed cam-belts, introduced by Fabio Taglioni on the 1977 Ducati Pantah, with a combined chain and gear-drive arrangement. A conventional roller chain runs from the crankshaft to the cylinder head where a gear, back-to-back with the upper sprocket, drives both camshafts.
The size of the oval throttle bodies has also been increased from a nominal 63.9 to a cavernous 67.5mm, with one injector below each fly-by-wire butterfly for mid-range torque and one above it for top-end power.
The designers also took the opportunity to increase the centre-to-centre distance between the gearbox shafts so they could use bigger, stronger gears and, for the first time in many years on a Ducati superbike, fitted a "wet" oil-bath clutch, rather than the traditional racing-style dry clutch.
The new clutch is based on the unit used in the Multistrada and Diavel street bikes, and uses a self-servo mechanism to compress the plates under drive, which lightens lever pressure and makes possible a genuine "slipper" action on the overrun, preventing the rear-wheel lock-up that would otherwise be a real problem on a high-compression 1200cc twin.
The high-pressure lubrication, titanium valves and chain-driven camshafts have made it possible to extend major service intervals to 24 000km; a full service for a Ducati will still cost you a small fortune but you'll have twice as long to save up for it!
And now for the most interesting part: Ducati's engine boffins let slip that they have rotated the L-twin engine six more degrees to the rear, from 15 to 21 degrees, allowing the engine to be moved 32mm further forward in the chassis, improving front/rear weight distribution and lining up the mounting points to make the new engine a fully stressed member of the monocoque frame.
Yes, Ducatisti, deliberately or not, they've leaked the new superbike's biggest secret: whether aluminium or MotoGP-style carbon fibre, the Panigale will have a monocoque chassis, rather than the tubular frame of every street-legal Ducati since 1947.
Roll on Milan.