09/04/2026
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a warp-speed Ducati 900SS café racer is probably one of them.
But sweet Jesus, sometimes you actually believe you need one.
That’s the beautiful, terrifying sickness at the heart of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Song of the Sausage Creature.”
“When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I’d rather have a Ducati superbike,” Hunter S. Thompson recalls in the now-iconic piece of writing. “It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. ‘Hot damn,’ they said. ‘We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away.’”
“Balls,” I said. “Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers.”
In our Free Spirits Journal we’re taking a hard look back at the Good Doctor’s most explosive treatise on the brutal nature of speed.
It was born from a warped editorial dare: handing a pristine Italian superbike to a man famous for destroying rental cars and consuming heroic quantities of contraband.
The result? A religious devotion to the redline and a grim rendezvous with the Sausage Creature—the violent patron saint of high-speed failure on cold asphalt.
Hit the link in our bio to read our full retrospective on HST’s immortal motorcycling manifesto.
🏍️💨🦇 GonzoJournalism
