Partnership Yields the Ducati Diavel for Bentley

Bentley Motors and Ducati are both brands under the Volkswagen Group umbrella, but partnership between the brands are not necessarily obvious. In the case of the Ducati Diavel for Bentley, a limited-edition motorcycle designed to evoke Bentley’s Batur sport coupe, this partnership arose from a conversation between the two brands’ CEOs about their mutual appreciation for motorcycling.

Batur, you may recall, is Bentley’s most powerful model ever and is the last model employing the company’s outgoing W12 engine. The 730-horsepower model is hand-built by Mulliner, which is Bentley’s in-house bespoke division, with only 18 units delivered to customers.

In the wake of the CEOs' discussion, Centro Stile Ducati was tasked with marrying the Batur’s horizontal character lines to the Ducati Diavel’s bodywork and applying Scarab Green, which is a deep metallic take on the classic British Racing Green, to the bike’s body panels.

Additional styling cues include side air intakes that evoke the Batur’s two-two grille and triangular air extractors that mirror their counterpoints on the car. The Ducati is available in greater numbers than the Batur, with 500 examples of the Diavel for Bentley available worldwide.

Ducati’s 168-horsepower, 1,158-cc Granturismo V-4 engine powers the Diavel. Its sound is recognizable because of the engine’s unique Twin Pulse firing order.

An additional 50 units dubbed Ducati Diavel for Bentley Mullinar will also be offered exclusively to Bentley owners. These buyers will collaborate with Centro Stile Ducati to match their motorcycle’s paint color to that of their Bentley and to select specific seat, brake caliper, and wheel colors along with their preferred finish of the carbon fiber parts. Owners can also customize their own appearance with color-matched jacket and helmet to wear while riding their Ducati.

In addition to the purely appearance-related items that are specific to the Diavel for Bentley, Ducati also created a new rear wheel for the Diavel’s single-sided swingarm rear suspension that applies the styling of the Batur’s wheels to the motorcycle. Because the sidearm is single-sided, the opposite side of the wheel is unobstructed, creating the possibility of viewing it directly like a car’s wheel.

Forged aluminum rear wheel by Enkei. DUCATI

Designing the wheel was difficult, explained Ducati design director Andrea Ferraresi, because motorcycles are more sensitive to increases in wheel mass than cars are. “The challenge is that styling a wheel normally makes it very heavy, and because this is a motorcycle, it must be light,” he said.

The Centro Stile Ducati team specified forging for the wheel to gain maximum strength from minimal mass, with production handled by Enkei. The design process was laborious, recalled Ferraresi. “We did it in CAD, then did simulation, then back to CAD, then prototyping, and testing, then homologation,” he said. “It was a mess!,” Ferraresi laughed. The final result was surely worth the effort.

Ducati Diavel for Bentley. DUCATI

Motorcyclists who appreciate both Bentley and Ducati can put their orders in for deliveries that start in the summer of 2024. The Ducati Diavel for Bentley lists for $70,000 and the Mullinar edition is $90,000.