Custom Ducati Monster

Take a motorcycle club racer, competitive bodybuilder and martial artist whose heroes are Buddha, Michelangelo, and Chuck Yeager, and challenge him to perfect and personalize the world's most exceptional motorcycles. The result is the mission statement of RetroSBK's founder William Kenefick.

Tucked away in the hills west of Los Angeles, RetroSBK's custom performance workshop is housed within the warehouse headquarters of respected aftermarket manufacturers Zero Gravity. Kenefick's work has delighted Robb Report MotorCycling readers before—his Freddie Spencer Tribute Honda 1000RR roared off our November/ December 2005 cover. Spencer himself rode this declaration of menace and elegance at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, his racing school's home. Between wheelies, the former 500cc Grand Prix World Champion was exuberant in his praise of Kenefick's self-styled gentleman's superbike.

Citing Arlen Ness as the master of the custom motorcycle universe, Kenefick proceeds on his course with a total absence of hubris. Having won three of California's annual Del Mar Concours D'Elegance, the Ducati Island Concours at Laguna Seca, and building bespoke bikes for a highly exclusive clientele, Kenefick is conscious of his audience's exponential expectations. His current projects include a tribute World Champion Wayne Rainey based on a 2006 Kawasaki ZX-10R chassis and engine.

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Ducati's famed naked bike is exposed further at the hands of Will Kenefick. Photograph by Cordero Studios (Click image to enlarge)

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Kenefick's most recent accomplishment is the makeover of Ducati's best-selling Monster. In S4R trim, this naked liter-engined streetfighter lights up road and track. But under his exigent gaze, whatever shortfalls the Monster's pedigree concealed were bound to be exposed. Kenefick's critical sense is the fruit of 12 years of intimacy and passion with desmodromic Italian beauties. His alchemy has been the transmutation of rough-edged head turning and loin-girding metal vixens into dazzling divas.

Ownership of a 1994 900SS-CR converted Kenefick to the cult of Borgo Panigale; his subsequent experience selling the brand and maintaining the private collections of local wealthy Ducatisti made him an indefatigable advocate. A track day meeting with Ducati Superbike champion Doug Polen cemented the bond and stoked the inspiration. Opening his own Ducati tech shop, Kenefick's first modified machines, christened Natasha and Isabella, were soon gathering awards.

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Photograph by Kevin Wing. (Click image to enlarge)

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Watching him at his workbench, one imagines Kenefick's ancestors from County Cork and Palermo hammering plowshares into swords and back again. Casting around his creative space, what looks like a 916 with yellow primer bodywork is undergoing Kenefick's bionic treatment.  “It's actually a 996 SPS for a doctor client,” he says. “We're constantly modifying it back and forth, so he can take it to track days and then go canyon-carving. It's like dressing up his date depending on where he wants to show her off.” He is fully aware of the anthropomorphic obsessions endemic to motorcycling's Alpha males.

Kenefick's bodybuilder background has served him well. “Just like humans, motor-cycles have a certain genetic aptitude for development,” he says. “My role is basically to put them on a training program to optimize their potential.” Kenefick's view of the Monster S4R defined his task as “turning a hot, but overweight and out of shape housewife into a warrior queen.”  Given that the heavy breathing over this model has led some to characterize it as a “two-wheeled Shelby Cobra,” Kenefick's assertions are bound to be regarded as slighting the original.