City kids gone WILD

These Scramblers ain't for scramblin'...

- Dave Manning

Scrambler 800 Icon, Full Throttle, Nightshift. 1100 Tribute Pro

Much of the current crop of stylish machinery is aimed purely and purposely at urban riders those folk that want a cool and stylish machine to ride into town and commute to work. And the greater majority of those bikes are marketed as such by the manufacturers - hip, city-dwelling machines that are ideal for battling through traffic yet will look ideal parked outside the swankiest of coffee shops.

And, while the image on this spread is clearly displaying the fact that the bikes in the Ducati Scrambler range are expected to excel in the urban environment, we don't think that any bike should be labelled as being made just for one job, or have the suggestion that there's only one place where it'll look good.

On the face of it, here are four bikes from one manufacturer's line-up that are very similar in terms of style, specification and price. The easy assumption would be that they're all very much the same bike (with some minor detail changes) that is made with just one job in mind, and that devoting a large part of one magazine to the four machines would be a little frivolous. Yet we wanted to see just how varied these four versions of Ducati's Scrambler model are, and how they coped not only in a crowded cityscape, but also out where we get the biggest of smiles with the best of biking kicks. And we got some rather surprising results...

DUCATI SCRAMBLER ICON 800

Base model brilliance

WORDS: Ross Mowbray

Ducati has hit gold with its Scrambler range. It sells a ton of bikes to the types of riders who probably wouldn't have been interested in the Italian firm's more traditional sporty output. With a couple of engine sizes to choose from, and a host of different models built around the same sorted chassis, it's pretty easy to see why they're so incredibly popular.