![motogp no spoilers motogp no spoilers](https://photos.motogp.com/2021/11/30/meymm__gia5082-2_0.video_list_2x.jpg)
Teams are explicitly banned from touching the engines – they are a sealed unit, which may only be maintained and worked on by the manufacturer, and have to be returned to the manufacturer after use. Under the Moto3 technical regulations, engines are homologated for a season, with each manufacturer committed to supplying identical engines to every rider who uses them. And the nature of the bikes created by the technical regulations can make marginal gains extremely valuable. They only provide marginal gains, and even then, can be sensitive to side winds.īut the way the technical regulations are written leaves few places to explore. Of course, these gains can’t compare with the benefits to be had from the kind of aero seen at the front of MotoGP bikes. By covering the rear wheel, you eliminate that turbulence, and reduce the amount of drag. The spokes of the wheel, spinning at high speed, churn up the air and produce turbulence, and turbulence in turn produces drag. What is the purpose of those rear disc wheels? By enclosing the wheel, airflow around the rear wheel is smoothed out, which reduces drag. The fact that there are so many parts of the bike capped by cost – engine and chassis packages, for example – means there is little room for exploring new technology.īut the very tightness of the regulations, and the nature of the class, keeping bikes close together, means it is inevitable that the loopholes that were open would be explored. With less competition in Moto3 – just KTM and Honda – the stakes were lower. The MotoGP manufacturers – once again led by Ducati – have turned their attention to bike attitude, using ride-height devices to manage the rear of the bike and extend anti-wheelie even further. Where Ducati led, others soon followed.įearing a spending war, MotoGP’s rule makes – the Grand Prix Commission – clamped down on what was permissible in MotoGP, and imposed much stricter rules on the Moto2 and Moto3 classes. Instead, Dall’Igna and his engineers turned to aerodynamic wings to keep the front wheel on the ground, maximizing drive onto the straight. No longer could the engineers write ever more sophisticated electronics algorithms to monitor and calculate the precise moment the front wheel would lift off the ground, and manage torque output to maximize acceleration while keeping the front wheel just above the surface of the tarmac.
![motogp no spoilers motogp no spoilers](https://photos.motogp.com/2021/05/12/fantasy---tips_1.big.jpg)
One thing which Dall’Igna did not mention was the reason he and his team at Ducati Corse started to explore aerodynamics so extensively.ĭuring the transition to the era of spec electronics, a lot of the tools engineers used to manage the behavior of the bike, such as wheelie on corner exit, were removed. Only in the last few years has significant progress been made,” he told ’s Steve Day. “Motorcycle aerodynamics has always been too often neglected. In a recent video on the website, which takes a surprisingly deep dive into aerodynamics, Ducati Corse boss and chief engineer Gigi Dall’Igna explains that aerodynamics is an underused and underexplored area of motorcycle engineering. The rule makers for Moto3 did their best to limit the use of aerodynamics, but that doesn’t mean that the manufacturers will not explore what is not explicitly banned. It is an immutable law of nature, however, that banning something in the technical regulations merely stimulates the ingenuity of engineers, and encourages them to find a way around the rules as written.