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Aw man... that is one of the few that us still missing from my favorites collection. It keeps eluding me...
It literally took several years to find one, and then another year to convince the owner to sell the bike and spare motor separately. When I started looking for one, I knew it was going to be a 916 series bike. Of that series, the 748R sounded like the most fun, and I figured that the '02, being the last model year, would be the most trouble free as both it and the 998 by that point incorporated 8 years of design revisions from the entire 916/748/996/998 model production run.
I had no idea at the time that only 15 '02's had been imported, the bulk of which went to racing teams and were long gone. Which left less than 5 in the wild. I've been able to locate three registered '02's, as well as the unregistered, zero mile one which Razee's in Rhode Island had, still in the crate, which sold last spring on BAT for $29,500.
Of my three bikes, this one is the only one I've never explored the upper rev range on, as it goes from about 40 something hp at 4K to 112 at 11,500. Over 6K the acceleration is pretty humbling, and it feels like it just wants to go quicker and quicker, and the front end starts feeling less and less connected to the ground.
Far and away the prettiest of the three, but like I said, if I had to pick one of my bikes to ride on a perfect day, it would be the SP2. There is not one thing it does better than the other two Duc's, but there is something about it... something really immersive about the entire experience.
