Written by Marlon Slack
For twenty years Laurent Kesteloot and Pascal Demeulemeester obsessed over custom motorcycles. They read magazines. They watched shows. Then they realised it was about time they have a crack themselves, and the clever pair started KD Motorcycles. Just a few years later they?re doing work like this – a 2005 Ducati Multistrada in a hand-built frame designed to tackle the Sultans of Sprint series.

You should know about the Sultans by now. But we?ll go over it again. It?s a short-range sprint series run across Europe. A competition that not only awards points for winning, but also for drinking, bravado and having the best-looking ride. And that?s what Il Veloce was built for.
Praying Mantis much"
So while the Multistrada needed to be competitive, it also had to look incredible. And there?s nothing inspiring about the stock Italian tourer. So the entire frame was built, from scratch, to look like an old-school drag bike. There?d be no box-section alloy here. No CNC. It was designed and built the old-fashioned way. The difficult way.
The KD team designed and built the frame from nothing in their Belgian workshop. ?Most of the parts were machined, folded, cut and polished in there,? they say. The process proved difficult, with no components of the existing frame used. Most importantly, there was no laser cutting and no 3D blueprint. Everything was done with a tube bender, metal files, grinder and welding rod.

Other parts of the build were sou...