[cycleworld.com] - Ducati’s Bagnaia Rules MotoGP Opening Round

[Ninjette Newsbot]

The opening round of the 2023 MotoGP Championship kicked off in Portimao. Saturday’s sprint race and Sunday’s GP ended the same way: Bagnaia in front.

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The opening round of the 2023 MotoGP Championship kicked off in Portimao. Saturday’s sprint race and Sunday’s GP ended the same way: Bagnaia in front. (MotoGP/)This was the first MotoGP run under new rules substituting a half-distance sprint race for FP4 on Saturday, and compressing the setup and qualifying processes. It is a law of televised entertainment that every year it must, to remain competitive, intensify its leading attractions. For many shows these are sex, glitz, and violence, and for motor racing they are high emotion plus race starts and finishes (minimizing the “droning” between them).

Francesco Bagnaia on Ducati did not disappoint our expectations—set last season when he became world champion—that he and other Ducati riders would stand out. He did—by winning both the first sprint race and the main event.

In addition, we have seen Aprilia advancing in performance, and Maverick Viñales was able to push Bagnaia throughout the main event and finish second. At the end, both men noted that their tires were finished.



A third expectation was to see the continuing shift of MotoGP power from Japan to Europe. The process began when Ducati joined the series in 2003, when there were four Japanese makes in contention, versus Ducati. Now, with Ducati joined by Aprilia and KTM, and the absence of Kawasaki and Suzuki, there are three European teams gaining power, opposed by just two Japanese teams (Honda and Yamaha), both of whom appear behind in the current aero race.

Have Yamaha and Honda fallen behind in aero by assuming that applied political pressure (such as has so far prevented application of rev limits to MotoGP) is a wiser use of resources than going to the wind tunnel and closing the aero gap?

In the US, this shift of power is ongoing, as the Japanese manufacturers are moving out of expensive California facilities in favor of more economical digs in the southeast. The US, for them, is no longer a hot sales area.

Angry debate has erupted over crashes at Portimão which have left four riders in hospital. Some propose that the greater tension generated by the new weekend format is causative. We have to see more races to know if this is a trend or a statistical cluster. Remember the sober and mature decision-making that has long been required from riders in order to make their tires go the distance. They are not mindless gladiators, acting on raw emotion in a “drive to survive.”

I use that phrase advisedly, for there is apprehension lest MotoGP is setting a course like that of F1, seeking greater revenue from a wider audience who will be fed a diet of endless second-hand emotion and “excitement.” Do F1 teams spontaneously form those human circles that prance up and down while revolving—something pioneered in football? Or did they receive memos suggesting such “spontaneous” displays of emotion? Mechanics, software writers, tire techs. All just feel like dancin’?

If you read the financial press, you discover that Bridgepoint, which holds Dorna stock, suffered low stock price during last year. Let us hope the reasons originally cited for buying Dorna still hold—that its value has been durable even in times of economic travail, and that it is expanding its operations in dynamic Southeast Asia (where hundreds of millions of people can now expect more from life than to be “happy laborers, philosophically accepting their lot”).

Another novelty of the weekend is that 14 riders quickly crowded under last year’s lap record, and Jack Miller commented that when he saw the lap time he was making while not pushing, he applied himself and was delighted with a wonderful lap time.

Related: Aprilia Patents Aerodynamic Leathers


Jack Miller pushed all weekend finishing sixth in Sunday’s GP. (MotoGP/)The track was last repaved before the F1 race in 2020, so it’s not that. A new Michelin front tire is expected in a year or two, but at present there is no talk of “killer tread compounds” that magically drop lap times.

What has changed? Wings have greatly expanded in area from the days when they were just designer stubble sprouting on the sides of the fairing nose—little stubs of just a few square inches’ area. Yet even in those primitive times there was talk of 70 pounds of downforce at maximum speed—enough to press the front tire down to banish “that floaty feeling” as aero drag, acting above the pavement, strove to blow the bikes over backward.

Remember that electronic “wheelie control” can stop wheelies only by throttling back the engine enough to maintain front wheel contact. But aero downforce can do better. Randy Mamola was recently heard to say that when his “two-up bike” (used for impressing inexperienced movers and shakers) was equipped with wings, he could no longer wheelie at 100 mph.

Lay persons think of wheelies as sensational, but as Valentino Rossi put it nearly 20 years ago, “The wheelie is the enemy.” When a wheelie begins, acceleration can rise no higher. As the front wheel rises, it takes less and less engine thrust to continue the process. High wheelies, therefore, do not indicate high performance. They indicate a mistake. What they mean is that the bike is now accelerating less quickly than when the front tire has barely lifted.

Riders pull themselves forward with sheer arm strength to keep the front down, allowing a bit more throttle to be used. The racebikes of today carry their engines and riders far forward—a contrast to days gone by when engines were set back against the rear tire, and rider seat backs were directly above the rear axle.

Now, aero downforce can help as well. If downforce from “stubble winglets” was indeed 70 pounds at 210 mph, then at a corner exit speed of, say, 80 mph it would be only one-seventh as great, or 10 pounds, and at 60 mph, one-twelfth as great, or less than 6 pounds. These small amounts will have some wheelie-suppressive effect, but not a lot. But if we now imagine that today’s much larger slotted airfoils produce 200 pounds at top speed, we are looking at more like 30 pounds of downforce at 80 mph and 17 pounds at 60 mph.

These larger downforce numbers will allow the rider to open the throttle more as he begins to accelerate, and that early acceleration provides extra speed that satisfies former Rossi crew chief Jeremy Burgess’ question: “Which would you rather have? Extra speed off of each of twelve corners? Or a small increase in top speed at the end of the one straightaway?


Aprilia’s large front foil is paying dividends, Maverick Vinñales finished second in Sunday’s full-length race. (Aprilia/)Just as in F1, it takes power to drive aero devices. How much? Let’s again imagine 200 pounds of downforce at 210 mph. If the ratio of lift to drag of our wing system is 8-to-1, that’s 25 pounds of drag. Because 1 hp equals 550 ft.-lb. of work performed per second, and because 210 mph is 307 ft./sec., we have (25 x 307)/550 = 14 hp. In the case of F1, hundreds of horsepower are used to drive the aero package.

Others have mentioned that at high speed, that loss could be somewhat reduced by lowering the back of the bike, thereby reducing the wing array’s angle of attack by 2–3 degrees.

I very much respect Marc Márquez for finding a way to qualify on pole. Those who work with riders know that they constantly run riding simulations in their heads and can be very analytical, but to turn Márquez’s dismal Friday into pole position a day later on the unrideable Honda required first of all working out how to do it, and then seamlessly writing it into his riding. Going faster results from devising something new that works. Not from grunting.

As before when the Honda lacked acceleration, Márquez said this weekend, “…the only way to do the lap time is on the brakes. And we are braking so late. If you don’t brake late like this, you finish 10th, 11th, 12th.”

When on lap 2 he felt the front lock: “Maybe the front was not fully up to temperature. I released the brakes and the bike went inside. I avoided Martín but made contact with Oliveira.

“I have been penalized for that mistake with a double long-lap penalty that I completely agree [with].”

Related: Ducati’s Jurassic Tail


Márquez will miss the next race in Argentina, and will have long-lap penalties when he does return to racing. (MotoGP/)That penalty will be imposed in the next race in which he starts (he will miss Argentina next weekend because of hand surgery necessitated by the crash).

Both Jorge Martín and Miguel Oliveira were DNF at Portimão as a result of Márquez’s error.

It is strange to me that so many people are offended by the present aero revolution in MotoGP. Were aesthetes offended when splashing paddle wheels were replaced by submerged screw propellers? Did their stomachs turn when the open cockpits of aircraft were enclosed by transparent canopies? These were predictable evolutionary changes.


Oliveira will also miss the next MotoG with tendon injuries that are not “amenable to surgery” according to the CryptoData RNF team. (MotoGP/)Right now there are two basic approaches to producing front downforce in MotoGP. Aprilia has chosen to use a full-width slotted airfoil at the level of the fairing nose’s “chin.” We might call this “the larger-wing-area approach.” Ducati, knowing that flow must accelerate to move around the bulbous fairing, has placed its airfoils in that flow, which moves faster than the motorcycle. We can call this “the velocity approach.”

Bagnaia was delighted with his win. “My team and I did a great job during testing, so the bike setup was already pretty much defined at the beginning of the weekend.”

Last year, riders on the previous year’s bike had the benefit of its mature setup, while riders like Bagnaia on the new Ducatis were at some disadvantage until their teams had worked through the learning process.

It can be argued that this allowed Fabio Quartararo and Yamaha to pull ahead in the first half of last season.

Yamaha remains at disadvantage: “It’s not just that the Ducatis are on another level. We have a completely different bike from the others and when the others lift their bike up [to accelerate} they have a completely different grip from ours.

“Because even if we get close [we can’t stay with them long enough] to try and prepare to overtake. For me that’s the main problem.”

We’ll get the next dose of MotoGP reality at Argentina, starting this Friday.