Using a 1994 Laptop to Tune the Ducati 916

Ducati set the world on fire with the introduction of its 916 in 1994. An exotic, track-bred machine, it shared a sophisticated Weber-Marelli fuel-injection system with the Ferrari F40 and Ford Sierra RS Cosworth.

“The 916 was the biggest thing on the planet,” Scott Waters says. “Everybody had to have one. We were building them for racers who paid for 955 engines, uprated suspension, the works.”

Waters joined the Vance & Hines Superbike race team in 1997. He's since become a one-marque specialist with encyclopedic knowledge of 916-era machines' quirks and intricacies as the owner of Long Beach, California-based Moto Servizio. He doesn't just know the unusual hardware used to wrench on production machines but also exotica like the FIM datalogger used on his own racebike.

The equipment dates back to the infancy of digital tuning. Vance & Hines employed Owen Coles alongside Waters, and the Australian had an FIM datalogging system that used twin lambda sensors, so both cylinders could be logged together. It was groundbreaking for its day.

To read the FIM datalogger, the team used Waters’ 1994 Compaq laptop with a 486 processor.

“The datalogger writes to a massive 128K chip in the laptop at a rate of 1 kilobyte/second, so it takes two minutes to download the data,” he explains, grinning at the antiquity of the process.

Software then allows Waters to alter fueling and ignition values across the map to create a more suitable power delivery. With patience, he’s able to create a map to suit individual tracks. The map is then written to a 256K EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) by a burner before the chip is soldered back into the engine ECU.

“Motorcycle technology really grew up around the 916,” Waters says. “We were among a handful of people in the country able to write maps. Today, that’s all changed. The bikes are smarter and the available systems are more intelligent, but they also remove some of the human interaction.”

“I’m living in a bygone era,” Waters admits. “But it all works for me. I like systems that involve a human operator. I’m still driving a ’94 Astro van, racing a ’95 bike, programming it with a ’94 laptop, and I have a VHS recorder at home. I don’t buy into technology for the sake of it.”