Should we just rip all the electronics and aerodynamic aids off of MotoGP bikes, or are the just-released 2027 rules for MotoGP a good move for the series and for racing in general? King of the Baggers doesn't have rider aids, so why does MotoGP and Superbike? Kevin Cameron and Mark Hoyer talk about rules in road racing and where the sport might be headed.
Subscribe to Cycle World Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/cycleworld?sub_confirmation=1
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
Subscribe to Cycle World Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/cycleworld?sub_confirmation=1
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 Welcome to the Psychworld Podcast.
00:02 Welcome back everybody.
00:03 I'm here with Kevin Cameron, our technical editor.
00:05 I'm Mark Hoyer, editor in chief.
00:06 We're asking the question this week, are rules killing road racing?
00:13 Are rules killing MotoGP?
00:15 We want to talk about lots of different categories of racing, but we're
00:19 focusing on MotoGP because the 20, uh, the 2027 rules were released.
00:25 They were.
00:28 And we're curious, Kevin, what does it all mean?
00:32 First off, like what's the basic outline of the rules, or maybe we can go through
00:35 and sort of give people the groundwork of what's up and then get into the details.
00:39 The current rules, the current rules have nothing against adding aerodynamic
00:46 devices to your motorcycle, given the approval of the, uh, technical director.
00:55 And there is also nothing against having variable ride height as you will find
01:02 on as an option on Harley's Pan America.
01:05 And I think there's another make that's doing variable ride
01:11 height as well on production bikes.
01:12 The great thing about variable ride height is just as you would lower your
01:18 street bike, if you were going to run in a drag racing class, it puts an
01:24 end to those pop-up wheelies that just destroy your elapsed time.
01:29 And on the other hand, there are people who say, oh, bikes are looking like
01:37 formula one now, and I, I don't, I want to whine about it.
01:42 Well, I can sympathize with that.
01:44 I, I remember those bikes that were ridden by Phil Reed that had a nice
01:49 big bubble that came right to the top of your helmet and they had a certain look.
01:54 Well, that look is past and it is also passe.
01:58 Technology waits for no man or woman.
02:02 So another thing that's happened is that bikes at the present one liter formula,
02:12 61 cubic inches, um, allows these engines to make close to 300 horsepower.
02:23 And that much horsepower is enough to drive a substantial aerodynamic array,
02:31 winglets, whatever you like, mustaches, slotted air foils, spoons, stegosaurus
02:38 plates through the resisting air.
02:41 And their lap times are falling.
02:45 This stuff works.
02:46 Well, is it not kind of a self, uh, I don't know if it's self-fulfilling,
02:51 but it, they feed each other because without the arrow, you're going to get
02:55 wheel spin with the wheelies.
02:58 Yes.
02:58 We're wheelies.
02:59 And so then you get arrow and it mashes it down and then you can give it more
03:05 power and absolutely faster.
03:08 Yeah, absolutely true.
03:09 Because in the past, and I'm talking about 20 years ago, uh, they had to come
03:16 up with wheelie control systems because engines is powerful.
03:20 And at that time they were maybe 220 to 240 horsepower, 2000 to three and so on.
03:26 Uh, coming off of corners, you would get these pop-up wheelies that would
03:33 annihilate your drive, just like they do your elapsed time if you're a drag racer.
03:38 And so they came up with various schemes to measure the height of the front
03:44 suspension and to take the derivative of it or the measure, the jerk or
03:49 whatever you want to call it.
03:51 And predict that, yes, this motion is a wheelie in progress.
03:56 We're going to retard the ignition.
03:58 We're going to close down the butterflies and bring the front wheel back down
04:03 so that control is maintained.
04:06 Well, the problem with that of course is any sensible person would say, why can't
04:14 I get a sort of reverse sky hook that will hold the front end down so that
04:19 instead of having the anti-wheelie system, give me a throttle cut that
04:24 brings the front wheel down.
04:25 Drag racers all know that if you have to knock throttle in mid strip, your run is
04:31 toast.
04:31 So it was the same thing because absolutely road racing is just a series of
04:37 corners connected by drag strips, same business.
04:40 So, uh,
04:46 what they've done now is they've started out with the little winglets, which
04:51 provided a bit of downforce.
04:53 And they found that that helped.
04:55 It also helped at a circuit of the Americas near Austin, Texas, where there
05:02 are undulations in the straightaway.
05:04 And if you're going 200 miles an hour or better, front end gets eerily light.
05:12 The people that drove the Porsche 917 called it a floaty feeling.
05:17 And I've seen bikes get the front end up over the crest of hills and threatened to
05:24 go over backwards.
05:25 And I've talked to riders afterwards.
05:27 They say you go for the back brake, brings it right down.
05:30 But again, it's slowing you down.
05:33 The cure for the wheelie slows you down.
05:38 So they began to, to have mustaches and all these, their, their aerodynamics
05:45 attached to the fork legs.
05:47 Now, what this did was it held the front end down in such a way that there were no
05:54 anti wheelie power cuts lap times down, down, down.
05:59 Yeah.
06:00 Well, you, uh, you reminded me of a story, uh, when you said it's just a series of
06:07 drag strips, you know, connected by corners.
06:09 Uh, the great Terry Vance, highly successful drag racer, um, you know,
06:14 Vance and Heinz, really great rider, obviously working with a very great, uh,
06:19 technician and Byron Hines, um, had a very brief road racing career that not that
06:25 many people know about.
06:26 Cause he always got the whole shot and then it went bad at corner one.
06:31 And he's, he's the first guy, he's the first guy to tell you anyways.
06:35 Um, yeah, it's, uh, I'm, I'm thinking about, uh, like Mugello.
06:46 I'm thinking about, I think they, I think the record was Bender it's
06:50 two 27 and a half miles per hour at Mugello.
06:53 That's popping out.
06:54 It's pretty solid.
06:57 And, uh, so that's one of the aim of the new rules is to, this is what, uh,
07:04 Dorna, who are the TV license holders for the series said that they were hoping to
07:12 accomplish with new rules that they were telling us would come soon.
07:16 And now they have come namely, they want to slow the action down a little bit.
07:21 They didn't want to achieve some kind of revolution, such as certain
07:27 spectator groups talk about.
07:29 I don't want to give all complete control back to the rider.
07:33 Manual spark advance.
07:34 I want, I want all that electronics ripped out of there.
07:39 I don't want to see all that formula one hardware hanging all over
07:42 those beautiful motorcycles.
07:44 So.
07:45 Their goals were modest to slow things down a bit.
07:50 So what they did was they've cut back displacement from 1000 CCs to 850.
07:57 Those of you who follow MotoGP know that.
08:01 Uh, the managers of the sport learned from their first reduction of
08:10 displacement, which occurred for 2007 from nine 90 CCs down to 800.
08:17 And what that provoked was an RPM race.
08:21 And when the first test of the 2007 bikes occurred after the last race of 2006 at
08:30 Valencia, the new bikes lapped more quickly than the existing larger displacement bikes.
08:38 But riders also complained about rideability, right?
08:42 Were, were they not having trouble?
08:44 You know, the thing is every time you go for more power, there's a good chance, a
08:50 high likelihood that you'll screw up the power band so that the rider will come in
08:55 and say, I don't know, I'm sitting there in turn five and I'm just hanging below
09:00 the power band and these people are coming past me on both sides.
09:05 So, and in fact, that's what happened to Honda in, um, 2002, 2003, Ducati
09:13 jumped in with a bunch of power.
09:16 They were impressively fast and the Honda engineers or more likely the managers
09:22 above them, the political people said, go get them boys.
09:29 And they dumped in a bunch of power and made their motorcycles harder to ride.
09:33 So lap times got poorer for a while.
09:36 So it's all horribly complicated, but in the case of this reduction from
09:42 a thousand CCs down to 850, they have specified a maximum bore of 75
09:49 millimeters, which means that the existing stroke of 48.5, just under
09:55 two inches, will be retained with the same stroke.
10:00 It's very likely that the same peak revs will occur rather than immediately
10:07 going to 20,000 or 21,000.
10:12 So that's a, a, uh, that's an element in their planning.
10:16 They have not restricted aerodynamics because they reasoned that if you have
10:22 less power, you will be able to push only somewhat shrunken aerodynamic
10:29 surfaces because it takes power to create lift.
10:32 So their creativity will be in balancing your, your lift or downforce.
10:38 With your power and then the cleverness will come out in, in, in the
10:45 subtleties of that aero design.
10:47 That's where the lap time can you get?
10:49 Yeah.
10:49 Well, I remember reading that at one of the many formula one formulas, uh, cars
10:57 were making around 800 horsepower and they said 500 horsepower were going into
11:02 the aero and 300 horsepower were accelerating the car.
11:07 So it can really get quite out of shape that way.
11:15 And it's much more moderate in MotoGP that yes, it may look like
11:20 formula one to some people, but these, these itsy bitsy little, they're like
11:24 attaching small model airplanes to the front of your bicycle.
11:29 They're not great big wings like they have on those cars and huge
11:35 arrays of slotted airfoils.
11:37 Although some of them look pretty similar.
11:39 Racing, getting slower.
11:43 What do you know?
11:44 Well, we'll, we'll, we'll find out when you see it.
11:48 Yeah.
11:49 Um, I think what's encouraging is that they are doing something because we don't,
11:56 you know, we want to have, uh, human speeds.
12:00 We don't mind the risk, but we like it to be safe.
12:02 And, uh, you know, I mean, manageable.
12:05 Yes.
12:05 By humans, by humans.
12:07 And, uh, one of the questions I have is, you know, if you're Dorna and you're
12:11 managing world super bike and MotoGP, what happens, how slow can you make
12:17 MotoGP and can world super bikes be faster than MotoGP bikes?
12:23 What if worlds is, is that, is that bad for branding?
12:26 Is that bad for branding?
12:27 Or is that okay?
12:30 So I'm curious if they're going to do something with a super
12:33 bike that would alter that.
12:35 And then I think, you know, you did a little bit of research on
12:38 top speeds with various tracks.
12:40 Maybe you can share that with us.
12:41 Uh, for example, at Phillip Island, one of the tracks that both MotoGP
12:47 and world super bikes attend, uh, world super bike top speed record was 333
12:55 kilometers and for MotoGP 352.8.
13:01 So there's a difference.
13:05 And that suggests a difference in horsepower of, you know, divide the
13:12 one top speed into the other and cube it multiply it times itself times itself.
13:19 Gives you an idea of how much more horsepower must be involved.
13:23 But of course, race bikes don't operate at top speed very often.
13:29 What they have to do is go around corners.
13:33 And, uh, MotoGP bikes are on Michelin tires and world super bikes are on Pirellis.
13:39 And the design philosophy of those two tire companies are somewhat different.
13:46 Pirelli has always stayed very close to a production frame of mind.
13:54 How can we make a product out of this so we can sell?
13:57 Whereas Michelin, uh, although they're moving toward that.
14:01 Traditionally, they were basically trying to beat the world and
14:06 they got to be very good at it.
14:07 But, uh, as to lap time differences, what I've seen is looking in the 2023
14:18 issue of MotoCourse, which is a book that's now really heavy, so
14:24 many beautiful photographs.
14:26 I love that thing.
14:27 But the lap times are between one and two seconds different on a roughly
14:34 minute and a half, a little more than a minute and a half is the usual lap
14:38 time on the five racetracks that they share.
14:43 So to get, to, to gain or lose one to two seconds, I think is going to
14:54 take a big difference in regulations.
14:58 So I'm not too worried that, uh, the Superbike guys will be prancing around
15:04 with their arms in the air and shouting, uh, factionalist slogans, but, um,
15:11 you never know, it could be fun.
15:14 So what do you think the expectation then is that we're on a trajectory like this
15:21 and that between aero development, if we left everything alone, aero development
15:25 and other things would put us up to here and we're kind of like nosing it.
15:30 We're not going to see a precipitous drop or what's your, what do you think?
15:33 Yeah, that's what I think.
15:35 I think, um, it's possible for example, that the engineers will say, oh, a 75
15:42 millimeter piston is X lighter than a 81 millimeter piston, and that means a
15:49 lower, uh, stress on crankshaft bearings and on the connecting rod itself.
15:57 So maybe we could kind of ease the revs up a little bit if
16:02 we could get enough air in.
16:03 Well, that's the question.
16:04 You know, that was my, that was my question to you is that what, what would
16:09 they do and would you not have a natural limitation by the bore size?
16:13 I mean, you, you know, you'd have to be pretty tricky about getting more air
16:16 through the same size hole.
16:17 So because, because in the case of the bore, um, it's, it's reduced to 75
16:23 millimeters, which means the valves must be smaller and there are limits to how
16:30 fast you can move air through ports and they are set by the speed of sound.
16:34 And although that sounds crazy to people, because if you divide the area of the
16:42 port into the area of the piston, you say the piston is moving at this speed, then
16:47 the air moving through this has to be moving at the ratio of the two faster.
16:54 But in fact, the first half of the stroke is just pulling a vacuum in the cylinder
17:01 because the air is sort of there like, huh?
17:05 Oh, my ears are popping.
17:06 And then only, uh, in the latter part of the stroke, does it really accelerate
17:13 and start ripping into the cylinder.
17:16 And just as a P47 Thunderbolt going 500 miles an hour probably has supersonic
17:23 flow as the air tries to get around that great big jug.
17:28 So in the intake port, there may be places where, uh, shocks are
17:34 invisibly messing with your flow.
17:38 So other people who actually know about these things, rather than just
17:44 speculate about them as I must, aren't talking.
17:48 Yeah.
17:49 Well, that's all, uh, that's interesting.
17:55 You know, my, my base reaction to the reduction in fuel capacity was that,
18:02 well, that's, you know, that's the 2020 part of the 2027 rules package is they,
18:08 they kick the fuel down and I thought, well, well, fuel is horsepower.
18:12 You know, they're not going to be able to dump it in as hard, but then you
18:16 pointed out, well, there's a, you know, there's a displacement reduction.
18:19 And then you talked about their relationship.
18:21 Maybe share that.
18:22 Yeah.
18:23 They, they have, um, essentially, uh, been generous by, uh, reducing the fuel
18:33 quantity from 22 liters to two 20.
18:37 And for the sprint 11 liters, the sprint is half the length of the GP.
18:43 Um, so they're throwing a little extra at the sprint, so you can really
18:47 get it and you're there throwing a little extra at the eight fifties
18:50 because, uh, they didn't reduce the fuel in proportion to the reduction
18:55 of displacement, but actually less than that.
18:59 So the fuel situation is, uh, they have to be careful, but not like the
19:08 battle days when, uh, they would, it was essentially would turn your engine
19:14 into a 1977 American car back in the era of stutter and stall, they were
19:19 trying to run them so lean to make them finish races that, uh, they had.
19:27 Dozens of fuel maps that they were constantly testing with.
19:31 So battle days, not coming back in that respect.
19:36 Right.
19:36 You don't want to race determined by somebody running on a gas.
19:39 Uh, think how stupid that would be.
19:42 Well, what a letdown.
19:44 But I had it one.
19:45 Um, so you're talking about arrow and, um, there let's get a little
19:54 bit more into that, uh, tail section.
19:57 Oh, they've, they've made a rule that the tail, which previously was, um,
20:03 not subject to any kind of oversight, but now it will be necessary to homologate it.
20:08 And I don't know whether you'll homologate it for a year or whether
20:13 you can bring them a new tail section.
20:15 Say, Hey, how do you like it?
20:16 We just finished it.
20:17 We put it on.
20:18 And, um, I, I rather think not because people who are in charge
20:25 don't like to be too generous.
20:27 Yeah.
20:27 But, uh, I think I'm pleased with these regulations because they've done what
20:38 they set said they were going to do, which is just to turn the volume down a bit.
20:42 Well, we've been talking about top speed, but you know, the other part of
20:48 the race course is corner speed.
20:50 You know, you're having your turns and you're having your minimum corner speed.
20:54 And when we test, you know, when we go to a racetrack and we throw our V-Box
20:58 on and we do our lap times, we're always interested in the minimum corner speed
21:02 because it's giving you an indication of the efficacy of the traction devices as
21:07 they are and, um, you know, obviously higher corner speed, better lap time.
21:14 And you get, you know, if you pick up a fraction of a second in 14 turns,
21:19 that suddenly adds up to something.
21:22 Part of the cornering speed for, for MotoGP bikes, of course, is now that
21:26 we're getting home, we're getting into this ground effects thing going on.
21:29 They're talking about how the fairing, when you see the photos, it's impossible.
21:33 The lean angle and the body position has evolved so dramatically that inside,
21:41 you know, photographs of riders inside corner, they're laying on the ground.
21:46 The bike is at an attitude that would have been a crash.
21:51 Not that many years ago, many years ago.
21:53 Absolutely.
21:54 And now the fairing is parallel to the ground and incredibly close and they're
21:59 working on reduced pressure there, which is downforce.
22:03 Yes.
22:04 And, um, did they mention that in the rules at all?
22:07 It is mentioned that no, anyone who's driven a van through a tunnel where you
22:13 can get up close to the wall, you can feel it.
22:17 And, uh, I don't know if anybody's, you know, you spent a lot of time in vans,
22:21 obviously, yes, life in a submarine on the way to races, got to make that
22:27 trek to Daytona every year, et cetera, et cetera, life in a van.
22:30 So you've got van experimentations that other people don't have, but yeah, it's,
22:35 it's remarkable, or just, just driving next to a big rig is, can have the same
22:39 thing where you get, you get pulled into the side of the rig, try it on a motorcycle.
22:45 Formula one cars have a Venturi form between the underside
22:48 of the car and the pavement.
22:50 And they have claimed in that series that they could race on the ceiling if they
22:58 could stay above a certain minimum speed.
23:01 And I I'd love to see it because then you could make the racetrack out of glass and
23:06 put the spectators on top so they could be in the corner looking down on their heroes.
23:13 What could be better?
23:15 I think it's, let's do it at Qatar.
23:18 I'll build it.
23:21 That, that low pressure there.
23:24 Uh, I think in, in ordinary everyday human life, we're not too familiar with
23:31 all this aerodynamics business, but, uh, for example, the wing loading, the amount
23:38 of weight carried by each square foot of the wing of a World War II Japanese Zero,
23:45 Mitsubishi is the manufacturer, was 24 pounds.
23:49 Whereas the wing loading of the B29 on the other side was, uh, 69 pounds.
23:58 And the notion of one square foot being able to carry 69 pounds, just like a
24:05 waiter carrying a tray of, uh, cocktails, it's outside my experience.
24:12 And so they get these guys to come in and, uh, work on, work up the aerodynamics.
24:21 And there's nothing there that is, that is futuristic or, uh, I mean, all that
24:29 jet plane styling that started in, in the early 21st century at the European shows
24:37 sharp points, sharp edges, zigzags, phony intakes, that is sales and promotion.
24:45 When you see the bikes show up, MotoGP bikes show up for the first preseason test.
24:51 They're in plain black, many of them, and they're smoothly rounded
24:56 like a British Hawker Hunter.
24:59 Well, subsonic, you know, like all the styling was supersonic.
25:04 Everything was like, ah, we're going to make it look like an F22 Raptor.
25:07 Well, we're not going that fast.
25:10 You know, as we've discussed previously in the books episode, you know, there's,
25:14 uh, Tony Stefanelli who worked at Buell also had a, you know, a career, uh,
25:19 designing wings in, uh, I believe it was IndyCar and he did it with a book from
25:24 the thirties, it was a subsonic study and it was all the NACA profiles and they did,
25:30 they just went through and said, Oh, this profile does this.
25:33 And he was just like, reads this book and puts it on a race car.
25:36 And, and, you know, obviously applying his engineering and intelligence to it
25:40 and making it work on a car, but, um, subsonic.
25:44 Yes.
25:45 Yes, indeed.
25:47 Organic.
25:49 Very nice.
25:50 So cornering speeds may, may not drop.
25:53 I mean, in fact, you might,
25:55 because Michelin will come up with goodies.
25:59 Pirelli will come up with goodies and there has been so much progress in tires.
26:06 Have a look at race photos from the sixties, seventies, eighties, and
26:12 compare them with the present day.
26:13 It's just one thing of course, is those old time tracks were bumpier.
26:20 And if you're hopping from crest to crest, the grip that you have is only
26:24 occurs during the short period of time when the tire's touching the pavement.
26:29 And the rest of the time you're going sideways.
26:32 So, uh, today we have notionally smoother tracks.
26:40 We have chassis with lateral flexibility.
26:46 As we saw when, um, Matt Oxley displayed the wonderful photograph that he made,
26:54 I think at Harith, uh, that showed a Ducati with the upper right streamlining removed.
27:00 And you could see that the engine hangers, it's just a thin sheet steel piece
27:09 attached to the frame in two places and attached somewhere around, uh, the
27:15 cylinder base at the bottom.
27:17 And it has no lateral stiffness whatsoever.
27:21 Well, why didn't they do it years before?
27:24 The reason I suspect, I hope that people will write in and
27:29 complain, write in what nonsense.
27:32 They just write in a box.
27:35 Yeah.
27:35 They just write in a box.
27:37 We'll, we'll complain.
27:39 But, uh, I feel that the reason that just adding lateral flexibility hasn't done the
27:46 job is because it's so easy if you make the chassis flexible to cause it to become a
27:52 self-steering motorcycle.
27:53 That as the chassis flexes, the wheels are deviating from the rider's intentions.
28:00 Yes.
28:01 When you feel that, you know, you feel that between the difference between, you
28:05 know, I had a 1937 Velocet KSS girder fork and a rigid chassis.
28:13 And, uh, I also had a, uh, have a 1954 Velocet MSS first year of
28:21 the swinging arm on the 500.
28:23 And, um, let me tell you, we were suspicious of swinging arms.
28:28 I wasn't there, but we were definitely, if you read back, people were suspicious
28:33 of swinging arms because you were disconnecting the axle from the steering
28:38 head and on a smooth road riding a KSS.
28:42 Was 86% more satisfying because the steering head relationship to the rear
28:51 axle was relatively unfailing.
28:54 You didn't really, you know, it was a good running three 50.
28:56 You didn't have enough power to, to torque, to twist, and it felt great.
29:02 And then you get on an, an MSS, like a Velocet swing arm frame is a pretty
29:07 good handling chassis for that day.
29:08 It's not, it's, you know, it's not a feather bed, but it's a
29:11 pretty good handling chassis.
29:12 Yeah.
29:13 And, um, your level of trust between what you're doing at the handlebar and what's
29:20 happening at the axle is significantly reduced and it's, it's, it's, you know,
29:25 you're not, you're not controlling it in a nice way.
29:29 You're getting things to happen this way.
29:30 And you're getting like automatic,
29:32 bad feelings.
29:36 It's expressing its own opinion.
29:38 Yeah.
29:39 Rather like a horse.
29:41 Well, uh, the old timers used to say nothing steers like a rigid.
29:47 And then in 1935, here came Moto Guzzi.
29:51 They won the senior TT end of the world, the end of sport, but immediately
29:59 afterward, uh, Joe Craig, the head of racing at Norton said, in my opinion,
30:06 that lap time that they achieved could not have been achieved with a rigid chassis.
30:10 Therefore the future will be rear suspension.
30:14 So, uh, the idea of making the motorcycle laterally flexible is that when the
30:21 motorcycle is leaned over at a 60 degree angle, the bump that you hit is not in
30:28 alignment with the motion of the suspension, the suspension in order to
30:33 absorb the bump completely would have to move twice as far as the height of the
30:39 bump, not going to happen, particularly when the suspension is already
30:44 compressed by cornering forces.
30:46 So the move was to build in lateral flexibility and they started small.
30:57 And I, I sort of heard the opening round artillery rounds at, uh, the Australian
31:06 GP in 93 when after in the post-practice press conference, Wayne Rainey said,
31:15 we have chatter, we have hop and we have skating and we don't know what to do
31:21 about it because they made their motorcycle more rigid yet again.
31:27 And suddenly it was too rigid.
31:29 So now things are going the other way.
31:32 And, uh, I think that, uh, Ducati have probably done the work to find out how
31:41 this, the chassis has to be shaped so that it can move laterally without any
31:48 twisting or other self steering action.
31:51 But I don't know that.
31:52 Yeah.
31:53 We've seen this for a while, but I mean, Ducati, I think, you know,
31:56 let's see, they had the, the, uh, you know, tubular steel chassis, the trellis.
32:03 Yeah.
32:03 The trellis.
32:04 And then much, much beloved.
32:06 Right.
32:07 And then they, they said, not we're putting this big triangular stiff thing on top of it.
32:13 And the black pyramid, black pyramid, not as good carbon fiber.
32:21 And Casey Stoner said on that thing, said you're going through the corner, same
32:28 variables as the previous lap.
32:30 And we've verified this over and again by looking at the data, but this time
32:36 you're sliding backwards in the gravel and your face shield is acting like.
32:41 Uh, earth scraper and your face is full of gravel.
32:46 So I did that at Catalonia on a Kawasaki.
32:50 Hey, Hey, peace with honor.
32:53 Yeah.
32:53 So this is a, this is a very, um, practical sport.
33:02 It doesn't advance by theory.
33:05 Well, you're talking about a rider as well.
33:07 Casey Stoner, uh, uh, I forget which engineer or, you know, management,
33:12 management type was working with him, but he would say, you know, most
33:16 riders are really repeatable.
33:18 You know, they go through and they, uh, go through the corner and, you
33:21 know, they have the gear and the Casey Stoner goes through at the same RPM.
33:25 Not just a little bit the same, but the same, like slice the
33:31 track and it's right there every lap.
33:34 And so you're talking about a guy who's, who, you know, uh, was eminently
33:38 repeatable and very much the alien supernatural power type person getting
33:44 hucked off by something that was like a little bit head scratching and you, you
33:48 know, that's not what you want, right?
33:49 And the reason, the reason that they went to the black pyramid, which was
33:54 wonderfully rigid, thanks to being carbon fiber, is that with the trellis
34:01 frame, what we saw at the time was weave the motorcycle doing that two to three
34:09 cycles per second oscillation that riders now call pumping and Casey said on that
34:17 thing, uh, he said it, you'd, you'd be in mid corner and it would just start
34:24 that pumping and it would limit what you could, what you could do with it.
34:29 And so, uh, they immediately went to the other extreme and it's over
34:38 several years following that.
34:39 It took them.
34:40 Well, it took nearly a decade for them to, to get back competitive.
34:45 It was almost as though the people at Ducati were saying, okay, the
34:51 Hondas are winning races by, by breaking late and very violently coming in on
34:56 the front wheel and then lift and leave.
34:59 That's what we're going to do.
35:04 Except that how are you going to beat somebody else with their philosophy,
35:10 which they've been practicing a lot longer than you have and their
35:14 rider, who was real good at it.
35:16 Do he feel so kept saying to them, we need more apex speed.
35:23 And they finally took to saying to him, what we want you to do is to be brave.
35:30 You say that you feel at risk going at these apex speeds, just be brave.
35:38 And so they had a compromise.
35:41 They brought in a whole busload of wonderful, talented, young
35:48 riders, fresh from Moto2.
35:50 And now they have, uh, they generally finish the, the top three to
35:57 five bikes are, are all Ducatis.
36:00 This is, this is taking turns.
36:04 People are already saying, oh, I'm not going to watch that.
36:07 It's all Ducatis.
36:08 Wait a minute.
36:08 These last two races were wonderful.
36:11 And there's all kinds of great stuff going on up front where the racing is happening.
36:15 Yeah.
36:16 I think, you know, getting back to the, getting back to the topic, uh,
36:23 the apex speed topic.
36:24 Yep.
36:25 Well, no, getting back to our rules, killing racing.
36:29 Oh, sure.
36:30 Yep.
36:30 No, I mean, I agree.
36:32 I think you have to, you have to manage them.
36:35 Well, um, you know, you get curious about the difference between something like
36:39 baggers and MotoGP and obviously much, you know, a very different, different
36:45 technical basis, but I think one of the charms of bagger racing is that
36:50 they don't have electronics, you know, they don't have rider aids.
36:52 They certainly do have electronics, but they don't have rider aids.
36:55 They don't have TC and they don't have anti-wheely.
36:58 And it's just like, come on, man.
36:59 Why can't we do that in MotoGP?
37:01 Why can't we?
37:02 Yeah.
37:03 Like what I think, how, you know, because what would that do?
37:10 Honestly, what do you, what do you think that would be a man?
37:13 Join the Navy, learn to fly and then have them tell you after you've learned to pick
37:18 up the third wire, have them tell you, oh, we're going to turn off the auto throttle
37:23 now, and we're going to turn off all the other pilot aids and now let's see how
37:29 well you do, uh, sir, could you repeat that?
37:35 Yeah.
37:36 Uh, you know, it would just be ridiculous because the electronics have developed
37:44 in step with the fantastic performance of both aircraft and motorcycles.
37:51 The idea of digital flight control, which is what all of these electronic
37:56 devices have descended from was originally a big argument within the Apollo program.
38:03 Oh, we've always used analog patches there.
38:07 We come up with a little problem that human reflexes can't quite handle.
38:11 We'll just lick them and stick them.
38:14 And after a while, you've got a tall pile of these patches and it's kind of like
38:21 being an old sickly person who takes 27 medications.
38:25 Do you think those medications might interfere with each other?
38:28 So there was a group within NASA that said, we've got to, we've got to unify
38:35 this, have everything handled from a single computer that is running software
38:43 designed to fly this mission.
38:46 And it, it's evidently true that the space shuttle was never landed by a human.
38:53 They trained to be able to do it, but it was landed by automated systems
39:00 because it's extremely difficult.
39:02 That's what you find when you read about it.
39:05 So I feel that, um, you could, you could perfectly well have a kind of racing
39:13 that many people will enjoy that would have no electronics.
39:16 And right now it's baggers.
39:17 It's, it's lovely racing.
39:20 You get to watch and see things that are subtleties in other
39:24 classes that become big, obvious.
39:27 Wow.
39:28 That thing's far out of control.
39:30 And yet he didn't tip over.
39:32 And people love that because it's dramatic.
39:38 And the rider, when, when he does overcome all opponents is gets all the credit.
39:48 But I think, uh, someone who's, who's trying to land a jet aircraft on a carrier,
39:56 a few knots above stall speed and do it right every time needs all the help he can get.
40:06 It's nice.
40:07 You would have a, I mean, the baggers are making a tremendous amount of power, but
40:11 they're also very big and you know, they're going to have a certain level of torque.
40:16 Or they have their RPM restrictions.
40:18 They have their things that are controlling the output.
40:21 And so if you took electronics, if you, if you remove those rules and just said,
40:26 Hey, you know what, fellas, it's an eight 50.
40:28 Have at it, do whatever you want.
40:30 Make the pistons as big as you can, you know, make big, big as you want.
40:33 Do whatever 18 valves you have at it.
40:36 Tear it up.
40:36 And, uh, what you're going to, if you had no electronics, then you can't have, you
40:46 can't have the peak power production that you're getting because they're smoothing
40:50 the rideable.
40:51 Well, they're controlling the torque curve right now.
40:53 That's what they're doing is it is a virtual torque curve.
40:57 The actual torque curve on the dyno may go up and peak and have a dip and go up
41:03 and then drop abruptly.
41:06 But most riding takes place on much less than full throttle, which means that you
41:12 can simulate a smooth torque curve by having, by conceptually turning the
41:20 throttle into a torque request.
41:23 The rider is saying, I want this torque.
41:26 The ECU then says, Oh, I can get that for you by doing the following.
41:32 And it does so.
41:33 And as the engine RPM rises, as you come off a corner and here comes the spike in
41:39 the torque curve, and you're about to be sent into the gravel, the little
41:44 butterfly just closes down to keep the growth in torque smooth and continuous,
41:50 much like the present day, uh, street bikes that have this Euro 5 torque curve,
41:57 which really should be called a Mesa because it's flat like a table.
42:03 Well, I just remember, I go back to the 500 era and I think about all those, all
42:09 the stories about anticipating, you know, anticipating this rapid rise, you know,
42:16 in 100, he's taking the throttle off and the bike is, is accelerating, right.
42:22 He's, you know, he is trying to artificially control the torque curve.
42:26 So there's a lot going on in the motorcycle and the amount of power
42:29 that MotorGP is making.
42:31 I mean, if you took, if you took electronics away, you would have to build
42:35 the engine, design the engine in a completely different way.
42:38 And.
42:39 This is what happened in dirt track.
42:43 In dirt track, people thought, okay, um, my buddy goes to Bonneville and his
42:49 cams don't look anything like what we're using.
42:52 I'm going to try it.
42:53 And you put those cams on and you find that you've got this peaky torque.
42:59 You got nothing, nothing there.
43:01 And you can't control wheelspin if you have a steeply rising torque.
43:09 So what dirt trackers did about that was they went, they shortened the cam
43:15 timing and they increased the lift.
43:17 And that is exactly what's going on in these recent parallel twin street bikes
43:25 that are so nice to ride.
43:27 They're shortening the timing.
43:29 They're taking away the overlap that causes a lot of UHC emissions,
43:34 shortening the timing, increasing the lift.
43:37 And then a lot of them have finger followers because short timing and high
43:42 lift means rapid valve acceleration.
43:45 So you have to take out any excess weight that you can.
43:50 So there's another example of how racing has assisted production bike design,
43:58 because in this case, the ability to operate the valves at very high
44:02 accelerations originally developed in racing, but now there's a need
44:06 for it in production bikes.
44:07 And it has to be reliable too.
44:10 Just dandy in my opinion.
44:14 Love that stuff.
44:15 Yeah.
44:18 So overall 2027 rules seem like a good thing.
44:21 Yeah.
44:23 Yeah.
44:23 I would have to agree that, that going 220 miles an hour, it's an exciting
44:29 number and the things look like they're going so fast, but are we going
44:35 to go 300 miles an hour next?
44:37 It seems like it's reasonable to say, we'll just turn it down a little bit.
44:42 Yep.
44:43 That's what they've done.
44:46 Well, let us know in the comments, what you think of motorcycle road racing
44:50 rules, rules in general in racing.
44:52 What would your solution be to slow us down a little bit?
44:57 Yeah.
44:59 I mean, it's, it's such a different, different expression than it has been in
45:06 the past, you know, tire manufacturers at war with each other overnighting like,
45:13 Oh, the temperature tomorrow is going to be three degrees warmer.
45:15 Call the factory, make the tires with the different recipe overnight them to the
45:20 track and have them ready for racing in the morning and not that, you know,
45:24 Michelin or Pirelli isn't doing that now in some way, but they're not doing it
45:29 versus each other, just all the different ways of controlling what's happening on
45:33 the track is, um, is always interesting and it's always a management process.
45:38 You know?
45:38 Yep.
45:39 Well, thanks for listening.
45:43 Like comment, subscribe.
45:45 Et cetera.
45:46 Uh, definitely want to see you down in the comments.
45:48 We love reading them and, um, we will catch you on the next one.
45:52 Thank you for listening.