Motogp Aerodynamics – If there was any doubt about the future of aerodynamics in MotoGP, it should have been decisively resolved at last weekend’s Portimao test.
The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora’s box has been opened – and frankly, the entire championship feels like it’s teetering on the edge of a very dangerous precipice, the potential consequences of which haven’t been fully considered.
Motogp Aerodynamics
Radical aero upgrades have certainly become the norm rather than the exception over the past few seasons, a job largely spearheaded by Ducati chief engineer Gigi DallIgna, who has been pushing the aero bubble since he first joined the team in 2014.
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It’s not Ducati that has really stepped things up in Portugal, but rather its Italian rival, Aprilia, with its new RS-GP modifications. The bike was impressive thanks to its fully enclosed front fender, almost fully enclosed front wheel and low-to-the-ground underbelly, but at the Portimao test, Aprilia opened new doors.
First, behind the current set came a second set of fenders that attach directly to the front forks to help create front downforce.
Two variations of the rear wing followed – one hanging down at the rear corner and the same variant acting like a wind tunnel, both aimed at creating rear grip and sealing air bubbles. MotoGP bike at 215 mph.
Then, perhaps most radically, came the rear wing – a Formula 1-style piece first debuted by test driver Lorenzo Savadori at the Italian Grand Prix at the end of May last season. Now in a more finished looking version fitted to Aleix Espargaro’s bike (with an on-board camera), it looks a lot like the part that will be used in anger in 2023.
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Producing such a rear grip that Espargaro initially thought might be responsible for the unexpected hand-pumping difficulties, it’s clear it works.
And, of course, there is a loophole in the rules that allows Aprilia to take full advantage of the new work. Although it is limited to what can be changed to one update per season, it is no longer a concession rule team, it only applies to the front and sides of the bike.
This allows the rear end of the bike to be changed frequently from session to session, something Espargaro hinted at is that Aprilia is looking to tune the RS-GP not only for specific tracks, but also for qualifying. , sprint and full length races.
But the Portimao airshow was stolen from Aprilia by Yamaha, who have their own version of a rear wing that looks more like something out of a Pikes Peak car than even a modern F1 car.
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Fabio Quartararo admits that it hasn’t made a significant impact and that it won’t see the light of day again in its current iteration, but it’s clearly what Yamaha has been working on and will continue to do. to follow.
MotoGP is a prototype series. It’s a championship aimed at pushing the envelope as far as possible, and to be honest, the riders will struggle with the ultra-light, 300 l.h. The cars are almost as far from the modern F1 car you see on the street. is its four-wheeled equivalent.
However, this belies the fact that this championship is a path to tread with caution for a number of reasons.
First (but honestly, probably the most important) is aesthetics. If you’re an old-school fan, it’s hard not to love the look of modern MotoGP machines with Frankenstein applications. Sleek and flowing lines are a thing of the past, with boxy shapes and straight edges.
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But this is not always a bad thing. It visually sets them apart as something special, and while it won’t appeal to everyone, most audiences (especially the all-important younger demographic) are huge fans.
Then there is the price. MotoGP may be a prototype series, but it’s really like any other championship in motorsport: governed by rules designed for some semblance of financial sanity. There is a control ECU, for example, to prevent teams from spending millions to fine-tune the last aspects of the software needed to make the bike go faster.
But aerodynamic R&D is the absolute money of modeling, wind tunnel time, trial and error, and supercomputer quantification. The amount of time and effort that can be put into it is limitless – and it will help not only the factories that are already involved, but also those who are willing to pour more money into it.
It also has the potential to significantly disrupt the championship standings, as the gap between the satellites and the factories widens rather than narrows. What MotoGP has prided itself on over the years is how fast its second-tier teams are. But if aero upgrades start coming only to factory teams, the independents will suffer.
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But all these considerations are secondary to the main reason MotoGP is cautious about aero: safety.
On the one hand, aero serves to make cycling safer. The stability of the brakes in particular makes cornering much safer, while the straight-line handling and its anti-wheelie effects, especially when the lights go out, all contribute.
But it comes at a cost. For every hundredth of a second that braking stability saves you entering a corner, you can stop a few meters closer to the apex – and closer to the walls and fence that surround many circuits. Gaps are smaller, breakdowns are faster, and mistakes are severely penalized.
In an age where many of the series’ most beloved older designs are facing questions about their future safety, aerodynamics is what keeps this line up.
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The British Grand Prix reopened the possibility of a three-way MotoGP title battle, but there were no takers of the guaranteed quality of racing. In this and the newest The Race MotoGP Podcast, 10 years ago I interviewed respected Formula 1 engineer John Barnard about what he would do to MotoGP design given a big, fat, F1-style budget. The man who introduced carbon composite chassis and semi-automatic gearboxes to F1 recently finished a few years with ‘King’ Kenny Roberts’ MotoGP project, where he never had the resources to explore the production areas he wanted to explore.
MotoGP aerodynamics was an area of ​​particular interest to him, as the science was very advanced in F1, but was almost unheard of in cycling at the time.
F1 cars get most of their incredible cornering speed from aerodynamic downforce, sometimes called ground effect, which uses the low pressure between the car and the racetrack to suck the car onto the tarmac and create a huge amount of drag.
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“When you’re talking about a 60-degree trough, you’ve got a lot of fairways near the ground, so there’s a big question about what it’s doing and what it can do,” he said.
I thought it was a bit of a fantasy, because a part of the body of a two-wheeler is hardly distinguishable from the underbody of a four-wheeler. Then I remembered talking to Roberts team engineers Mike Sinclair and Warren Willing in the 1990s. I asked the pair – two of the brightest minds in motorcycle racing at the time – whether motorcycle traction control would one day be as smart as F1 traction control.
No, they said: motorcycles are more complicated than cars because they lean, bend, and bend, plus the size and shape of the tire contact patch is always changing, sometimes the front wheel is in the air, sometimes the rear wheel is in the air, and so on. “A racing motorcycle is more like a jet than a car,” Willing told me.
In the end, science proved Sinclair and Erkin wrong. So perhaps ground effect could be made to work on MotoGP bikes, giving more grip for faster cornering speeds and