That's the most amazing part, I think. Now if you strip that down into race trim, imagine the package you'll have! ZX-10R, BMW HP4, RSV-4, whatever, nothing is going to touch this bike as far as power/weight ratio, and it won't even be close. We've all been lulled into a false sense of what is the maximum possible due to the bikes that have been available the past 10 years, but this bike is resetting the bar way up there. It's not the same as the Desmosedici, that bike was not built to reset a performance benchmark, it was built as a collectible Ducati and a celebration of the MotoGP championship. The SL is different, it's a dagger aimed at the heart of the sporbike market to put everyone else in their place and show what the "new" Ducati is capable of with VW's backing. Comparisons to the 1199R are pretty much irrelevant, this bike is not an evolution of the 1199R, it's a new bike. It's not just a little bit beyond an 1199R it's WAY beyond.
When Ducati launched the SL at the dealer show last year, Claudio Domenicali said that the design brief for the bike was dictated by Ferdinand Piech (Chariman of VW) as the absolute maximum that is possible with the technology available to produce a bike. When the Ducati engineers went back and provided the design, it was presented to Mr. Piech with the caveat "Here's the maximum we can do, but we can't build it because it's going to be too expensive". According to Domenicali, Piech's response was "I don't give a .... how much it costs, just build it!". That's verbatim of what Domenicali said. So this is not another evolution of the product line, it's a one-off separate project to elevate Ducati back to the undisputed king of production sport bike technology and performance. And luckily for the rest of us much of that technology will trickle down into the rest of the product range as we move forward. For those lucky enough to ride one, I'm pretty sure we're going to feel the same was as the dude in that first review, and it won't have anything to do with riding with "new bike blinders" on, it's really going to be that good, it HAS to be given the way the bike was built.
