Written by Martin Hodgson
There is nothing in the laws of physics that says leaving a pile of parts in a junkyard couldn’t result in the wind alone turning them into a sweet custom machine; it’s just that the odds are infinitesimal. Instead, to make it a sure thing, you only need to park a modern Ducati Panigale next to a classic 1973 Honda CB500 in the Duke Motorcycles workshop. And here in the foothills of the French Riviera, they’ve created this low entropy, high energy, retro tech cafe racer they call ?Mrs Duke.?

Of course it won’t be ready right away, head chef of delicious customs at Duke, Lionel, has more than 20 years experience in the motorcycle game and likes things done right. With a whopping 700 hours of build time required for him to work his magic on this one machine in his simple garage to finish the final product. At current rates of pay and the quality components used this makes it one hell of an expensive build. But that was never the point, he built it for himself and as he tell us ?it is a personal project that I wanted, deliberately different from what we can see, a project that looks like me and that highlights my style and all the methods of work that I use.?
The challenge he set himself was to create a ?2018? cafe version of a Honda CB500 Four by mixing old and new, much like many of the manufacturers churning out retro bikes, just that this is of a much higher standard. The modern Ducati components are far from a bolt on ...