Michael Scott | August 3, 2022
Cycle News In The Paddock
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Is Ducati The New Honda?
Is Ducati the new Honda? Current events in MotoGP show a kinship that is both impressive and slightly alarming.
One common thread is a clear and rather heart-warming reliance on having plenty of horsepower and all the good things that come with it.
Another is a certain arrogance—an attitude. It is the creed that engineers are the most important part of the race-track combination. The riders are secondary. Under the autocratic control of the gifted Gigi Dall’Igna, this notion has been heavily reinforced.
For Honda, it’s ingrained, and has been for years. Rossi’s long-serving crew chief Jerry Burgess, a long-term fixture at Honda with Gardner, Doohan and Rossi, summed it up neatly. “For Honda, riders are like light bulbs. When one burns out, you chuck it out and screw in a new one.”
That attitude triggered Valentino’s turncoat departure to Yamaha at the end of 2003, taking Burgess and his mainly Antipodean gang with him. Valentino was determined to prove that it was the rider that made the difference, not the bike. Four more championships proved his point.
If only he’d stopped there, for exactly the opposite happened when he went to Ducati for two years. The bike ruled the results. And not in a good way.
“For Honda, riders are like light bulbs. When one burns out, you chuck it out and screw in a new one.”
The Italian Stallions have been revitalized since those dark days. As well as being the most technically adventurous MotoGP bike, the Desmosedici is reliably the most powerful. Desmodromic valve gear is not just for bragging rights, you know. It cuts engine drag and offers very precise and very rapid valve opening and closing, especially at high revs. It all adds up to horsepower.
Dall’Igna didn’t stop there. Ducati combined their enviable engine with a raft of innovations to the cycle parts. Ducati was the first with wings and continue to set the pace with aerodynamics. They were the first with the “spoon” ahead of the rear wheel—nominally to cool the tire, but also with aero benefits. And they were the first not only with shape-shifting launch control, but also to introduce it to both ends of the bike, and to allow riders to operate it during the race rather than just off the start line.
In every, case rivals have tried to thwart them, then copied them—at least until this year, when protests forced a ban on “any device that modifies or adjusts the motorcycle’s front ride height while it is moving.”
Responding to the ban, sporting director Paolo Ciabatti made clear the company’s disappointment. The investment in time and money was “fully compatible with our budget. Some manufacturers spend high amounts on their riders. It’s up to them. But they should not criticize when we spend money on development.”
All this makes it very clear. Ducati’s main emphasis is on engineering.
Valentino was determined to prove that it was the rider that made the difference, not the bike. Four more championships proved his point.
But back to the light bulbs. The Bologna firm has a dazzling array—eight riders is at least double any other constructor, and in the case of Suzuki and Aprilia four times as many.
Trouble is, almost all of them are 200-watters. Every Ducati rider has won at least one grand prix, and half of them have won in the premier class. Four of them—Bagnaia, Bastianini, Martin and Zarco—are former World Champions.
Small wonder that they take points away from one another at every race.
Seems that Honda may have played the light-bulb strategy better. By and large, at least since the long-distant days when Wayne Gardner and Eddie Lawson disputed the 1989 title on rival Rothmans-backed NSRs, they concentrate on just one very bright bulb. They won the majority of riders’ titles over the past four decades with a steady succession of genius-level stars. Spencer, Doohan, Rossi, Marquez—a burning-bright array.
But this strategy has its own risks, and it has cost them dear for three seasons now. The absence of arc-lamp Marc Marquez meant a historic zero wins in 2020, only a handful in 2021, and a 2022 where the prospect of another winless season has been compounded by a German GP with not even a single point—a first since 1982.
But Honda is not alone in this. Just one race after that German round, Yamaha followed suit—Quartararo crashed out, and the other three riders failed to score a single point. The best of them, Dovizioso, missed out by three full seconds. This was another downbeat landmark—the first time without a single Yamaha in the points since 1985.
Should Quartararo get hurt, Yamaha will find themselves in a very deep hole. Seven spare light bulbs might be too many, it helps to have at least one in the cupboard. If you can find one.
Ducati’s light bulbs clearly undermine each other’s title chances. But the factory engineers can at least gloat about the near certainty of a third successive constructors’ crown. CN
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