2003 Ducati 749 - Car Crafted Custom

When custom car essence meets italian exotica, a pretty special machine is the result.

From the August, 2010 issue of Super Streetbike

By John Zamora

Photography by John Zamora

In 2005, Gooichi Motorsports' Sam Morris was just a starving college student. Despite a serious lack of funds he still wanted to build a custom sportbike that showcased his style as well as his mechanical skills. "I bought a used Ducati 749 and had some ideas for a custom exhaust. From there it all just snowballed," Morris explained.

A direct descendent of Pierre Terblanche's 999, the smaller 749 was introduced as the middleweight muscle in the Ducati line-up. But with twin stacked oval headlights, huge car-sized exhausts and quirky bodywork it was widely considered one of the ugliest Ducati sportbikes ever made.

This 749 is quite a stretch from the typical 'Busas, Gixxers and R1s. So why did it catch Morris' eye? "Honestly, why not? I love Ducatis and no one else had built a 749. From the paint to the seat the whole bike is old school. I didn't want to do something that everyone else does.

I'm a little bit of everything: I started in cars, and now I'm doing bikes. I have a turbo Civic and a custom RX-7, and I'm also going to school for automotive technology which helped form the root of this build."

The exhaust design has obvious hot rod influence. You can imagine how hellacious it sounds.

When it came time to start cutting, he pulled out all the tricks from both his automotive upbringing and personal collection of modified motor vehicles. As a result, the bike is an unlikely mix of hot rod, chopper and specifically designed one-off parts. Morris gave a quick synopsis of how the build played out: "The first thing we did was slam it. I had to remake the exhaust from scratch because we lowered it so much.

Diablo made the swingarm and had a tricky time doing it. I really didn't want to go with chrome wheels, so I went with something completely different with the wire spoke wheels. I saw them on a couple of choppers and liked the look."

When it came time for the air ride, Morris designed his own system from scratch. Rather than the typical air cylinder shock, he came up with a purely mechanical unit using cylinders designed for industrial applications. "We [Gooichi Motorsports] wanted to design a prototype that could be tuned. We made the whole thing to be mechanical. It's all manual control and has air going to both sides of the shock. The shock can rise to a preset height and the firmness is also adjustable. It has adjustable settings so if it drops down to a preset height it will fill back up.