Ducati Unveils the 2010 Desmosedici

Henny Ray Abrams | January 13, 2010

The 2010 Ducati Marlboro Desmosedici was dramatically unveiled when a cave made of Ducati red balloons was sent skyward to reveal the weapon that Casey Stoner and Nicky Hayden will take into the 2010 MotoGP World Championship.The bike was unveiled before a pristine background of snow-covered pines on the slopes outside of Madonna di Campiglio, the ski resort in the Italian Dolomites that’s playing host to Wrooom 2010, the annual combined Marlboro Ferrari and Ducati team intros.Earlier in the day, Claudio Domenicali, CEO of Ducati Corse and General Director of Ducati, explained that because of the new technical rules, which mandate only six engines for the entire 18-race season, all the major engine parts had been redesigned.”To go almost 2000 kilometers [1240 miles] – 1600 kilometers [992 miles] – with every motor, with a motor that goes over 19,000 rpm isn’t a simple assignment,” Domenicali said. “Filippo [Preziosi] and his boys had big challenges in this area, and I’d say that with time, we’ll start the races with something that’s radically changed from before. All of the principal parts were redesigned-pistons, rods, crankshaft, basic parts. It’s a motor with which our main objective was to minimize the loss of power to increase durability. It was a change that will be very useful and interesting, also because normally in racing, durability isn’t the principal objective.”Perhaps this objective enabled us to perform a series of experimentations that will also be interesting for the new production motors that we’re developing, because at this point they become almost comparable. For a production motor 2,000 kilometers of track use is a severe challenge, so we start to think that the race motor durability are comparable with production motors. This is also a very interesting point.”To further illustrate the point, Domenicali also made the surprising revelation that the MotoGP engines would last longer than Ducati’s World Superbike 1198 engines.In response to a question about engine durability, he said, “About the life of the engine, the answer is yes: 2010 MotoGP engine will last more than Superbike, just because we made the whole development in this direction. And the Superbike engine, because of the rules, is very much close to the production one, in terms of components, even if some journalist with orange jacket in front of me shake his head,” he added with a smile, singling out a skeptical Italian journalist known for long-winded questions. “Really this, we are racing with production parts. And so when you try to get the maximum performance and you increase the revs of an engine and you keep the production parts, by definition the life is decreasing. So we have less lasting engines even if the cost is dramatically less. It’s dramatically less because it’s made of production parts.”Domenicali also pointed out that the new bike was “aesthetically different, because of the redesigned fairing, but we already saw that at Estoril. At Estoril we used a different fairing and some different components, because we did a new package at mid-season. This fairing is less sensitive to lateral wind and also makes the bike more maneuverable, and this was retained for the GP10. This package, in addition to a series of minor modifications to the electronics, etc., represents the improvement.”We have a group of over 100 people who work continuously on the improvement of the bike, so the principal modifications are the indicators, but in reality, following the riders’ input, we try to continuously adapt and improve the bike.”