He Just Wants to Play!

The first adventure playground? The sandbox. Because, with a little daring and perseverance, you could create the most fantastic worlds there. You just had to part with the standard plastic molds early enough. A shovel and water, that’s all you really needed. At the same time, you simulated some of the more serious aspects of life by fighting with the other little adventurers over the usually quite limited space in which to build. True, the worlds you created were extremely transient due to the rather unstable building material, but so what? A new day, new ideas, new adventures. Just kid’s stuff? Not at all. Some playtime in a sandbox would do us adults some good as well.

But where to find such a sandbox for grown-up kids? A good place to start is the SC Neuenknick sports club in Petershagen. In the late 1960s a group of motorsport enthusiasts took an abandoned sand pit here and converted it into an adventure playground for two-wheelers. A cool oval of sand. A venue for serious dirt track races. Or just a place to practice your drift. All you need is the right tool. And there really is only one choice for the job. In 2015 Ducati had the wonderful idea of simply letting its superbikes and supersport bikes and superstock bikes just be super for a change and brought back the more laid-back side of motorcycling with the Scrambler. Pure fun instead of pure speed, experience instead of competition. Totally sandbox-compatible. Of course. It’s a scrambler, after all.

The scrambler of choice is the 2020 Full Throttle. A tribute to the sport. Because the Full Throttle is inspired by customizer and flat track star Frankie Garcia. A wonderfully minimalist design, with a striking yellow and black tank. The side number holders underneath the seat are a sign that this bike can get down to serious business if it wants to. But the Full Throttle also shows poise with its aluminum handlebars and flat-track-inspired seat with passenger cover. All underscored by the 73 horses of power generated from its 803-cc, air-cooled L-twin. Acoustically garnished by the down-to-earth sound from the Termignoni exhaust. And when the 67 newton meters of torque come into play, the fun can begin.

Put it in gear, give it some gas, and make the sand spray like a fountain. You don’t need any molds for that. Temporary works of sand art are conjured up with a twist of the wrist. The Scrambler Full Throttle lets you interpret torque in a completely different way. Instead of just developing power and pushing ahead, you can transform that rotational force into turning pirouettes in the sand. Let others push their speed and clock kilometer after kilometer per hour, while we accumulate smiles per second on the Neuenknick sand track.

You can even go wonderfully off-track here by plunging yourself into one of the nearby sand pits that teem near the Weser floodplain in much the same way that the salmon teems elsewhere during spawning season. Going up and down instead of flat, the Full Throttle proves to be a reliable friend that not only shows you the way to go but can also handle a bit of mischief if you approach a dune too optimistically. But, okay, failure was always part of the childhood sandbox experience as well. In the meantime, we’ve come to appreciate the value of protective gear for those moments when we’re feeling more adventurous than may be good for us. But isn’t that what sandboxes are for?

The only catch is that the Full Throttle, in the playful version that was available to us, no longer forms part of the Ducati lineup. Though it’s not as if the guys in Borgo Panigale had lost their desire to scramble. The alternatives, all of which were built on the same technical foundation, starting with the Icon, promise to duplicate the authentic sportiness and fun. At least in terms of its color, with its yellow-silver tank and yellow mudguards, the Icon is a match for the Full Throttle. The Icon Dark offers a matte black finish, while the Nightshift is specially designed for fans of classic café racers. And for anyone who really can’t keep out of the sand, there’s the Desert Sled. A tribute to the enduro bikes of the 1980s with a distinctly off-road character, the Desert Sled extends your operating range immensely – in the sandbox and beyond.

And that’s a promise.