How Ducati business has evolved in terms of service, guaranteeing an improved reliability

Moto Rapido has recently been updated from a Ducati dealership to a dedicated Ducati Service Centre. Steve 'Wilf' Moore, Owner and Moto Rapido Ducati Racing Crew Chief, talks through the changes that have been going on at their specialist base in Hampshire, and how Ducati business has evolved over the years in terms of service, guaranteeing an improved reliability.

2025 marks our 20th year with Ducati and there's some big changes happening here at Moto Rapido. We're now going to be a Ducati Service Centre and concentrate on the service, aftersales, and parts business of Ducati, performance tuning, and of course racing.

A big part of what we do is Ducati spare parts supply. This is something that still has a lot of preconception about delivery, availability, and price. This is something Ducati addressed massively in recent years.

We have two guys dedicated in our parts department, and we get a delivery every single day from Ducati, directly from Bologna, which means we don't have to stock every single part for every single bike. Now we still get the phone calls from people saying, I've got a 1998 ST2 and you won't be able to get the part for this. And it always surprises them when we can.

Last year, 95% of the parts ordered were delivered within five days, and 85% of those are from stock.

Gone are the days of "I can't get this part". I can't get that part. We've got some real experts in the dealership here, and Ducati parts supply is superb.

Another big misconception about the Ducati brand is how expensive these things are to service and look after. And they're not. Maybe 20 years ago, certainly when we started in the earlier generation with Desmoquattro engines that we had to do valve clearances on every 6000 miles. Yeah, they got a bit expensive to look after. But the new generation bikes, the Multistrada V4 for example, has 36,000 miles until we check the valve clearances on that bike. And we've only seen one or two because the bike's only a few years old.

So, these are now very good value to have serviced by coming to your main dealer for servicing. You also preserve your warranty and your service history.

This fits in perfectly with what we're doing at Moto Rapido. We've not having new bike sales. It frees up quite a bit of workshop capacity for our customers, and for us to support the other dealers in the network. 

Around us here in Hampshire, we've got some great dealers. We've got to Ducati Bournemouth, Ducati Alton and Ducati Oxford, all in close proximity to us. We're no longer in competition with these guys. we're working very closely with them. If they have one of their customers who buys a new bike, has a problem, needs a service, needs a last minute tyre change, needs an accessory fitting because they didn't want to buy it at the time, but now they do. Then we're here for those customers as well.

Certainly over the last few years, the reliability has been vastly improved. Now I know there's going to be people that say, but my bike had a problem. These are all motorcycles. Motorcycles inherently aren't perfect, in any brand and any model. But we see a massive decrease in the amount of warranty claims and serious problems. With bikes having been developed racing in BSB over the last 12 years, we've gained a lot of experience and what we have here is the same people in the same workshop working on our Superbike, our SuperSport bike, building our engines, as working on the customer's bikes. That experience teaches you so much about every detail in these motorcycles.

This is going to be a bit of a shocker, but in British SuperSport the Ducati is the cheapest bike to run. And this is following on from what I said about reliability. It might not be the cheapest bike to build or buy because we make them really nice. But to run the bike, most of the teams are using one engine for the entire season.

They bring the bike back here mid-season for a basic check over, but not an overhaul. The rest of the time they're just changing the oil and filter, doing a whole season of racing on one motor.

We race the V2 in British Supersport, 2023 in which we won the championship in, and 2024 with the same motor and had zero engine failures, zero mechanicals. There's not many Supersport bikes that can do that. We have been racing a V4 Superbike since 2019 in the Superbike class in BSB, and I've never had a technical failure on the engine. Never. And these are ridden by guys that have zero mechanical sympathy, it's a much tougher class than on the road.

The evolution of parts supply, the evolution of the motorcycles, reliability, production values have all changed enormously, particularly in the last few years, and that has allowed us to change, and to focus on those parts of the business with Ducati."

www.motorapido.co.uk