While road trippin’ around Europe, DRIVEN ed Dean had the opportunity to check out some seriously fine machinery in person at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
While he could probably talk our ears off about any number of cars he encountered at Goodwood, it was when he pointed to the debut of Aston Martin’s first motorcycle that got RIDDEN’s attention.
Unveiled back in 2019, the Aston Martin AMB 001 is built in collaboration with Brough Superior, with the AMB 001 boiling down to a two-wheeled expression of everything Aston Martin. The team at Aston handled the design work, while Brough put its aerospace-grade factory in France to the job of actually building the bike of Aston Martin’s dreams.
Originally slated to be hand-built at the Toulouse factory in 2020 - you know what this means - deliveries are finally taking place now in 2022.
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As with all things rare and unusual, the AMB 001 comes at a serious price point and is limited to just 100 examples worldwide, of which 90 bikes are already spoken for at last count. Oh, and just like the Aston Martin Vulcan, the AMB 001 is a track-only affair.
At its centre is Brough Superior’s 997cc 88-degree V-twin. While it’s not even a particularly large engine by motorcycle standards, the AMB 001 puts to its rear wheel a tyre shredding 134kW thanks to - you guessed it - a turbo!
Thanks to the wide V of the engine, the AMB 001 packages the turbocharger in between the cylinders, meaning no unwanted bracketry hanging outside of the carbon fibre bodywork.
The only other series production motorcycles of note to use forced induction are Kawasaki’s H2 and ZH2 models, which both opt for a supercharger to add a boost to their step since turbocharger lag and motorcycles typically don’t mix well together.
To address the lag issue, the AMB 001 uses an intercooled variable geometry turbo with a low inertia turbine specifically designed to avoid turbo lag.
The pièce de résistance comes in the AMB001’s soundtrack, which absolutely sounds the part despite lacking six fewer cylinders than usual.
Ducati moves into crypto
In recent years, Ducati has made it quite clear it isn’t afraid of adapting to new technology. With a number of world firsts to its name including the first motorcycle with active cruise control (the Multistrada V4), the Italian marque has completely embraced the digital revolution.
This month Ducati announced its intentions to get into the world of “Web 3.0” by going where no motorcycle manufacturer has gone before - the somewhat murky world of NFTs.
According to Ducati part of its partnership with NFT Pro will see undefined upcoming projects deployed using Ripple, a leading blockchain partner providing technical support on the ultra-fast, low-cost, and carbon-neutral XRP Ledger (XRPL) blockchain.
It seems like a strange venture for a motorcycle company, but maybe that is the genius of it? After all, Ducati has shown time and again it doesn’t mind dabbling in the digital world, as seen with rather successful Ducati World Premiere digital product launches.
To many of us the world of cryptocurrencies and NFTs is a somewhat shady type of investment. But maybe Ducati, owned by the powerful Volkswagen Group, might just give the digital commodities a bit of a much-needed boost in respectability.
Time will tell how much motorcyclists care about the digital periphery of motorcycling. To me, I’d rather spend money on actually riding and enjoying physical motorcycles, but maybe I’m an outlier here.
