OK, now that Rossi has thrown in the towel, & no-one else seems to be able to make the bike work ( apart from the one season when stoner wrestled it to victory, despite it's waywardness, but this thread is NOT intended to be about the riders ) what do we armchair experts think is wrong with the bike? it's plenty quick enough in a straight line, but looses out a few tenths every lap on the brakes/corner entry & exit, with riders complaining of a lack of feel & confidence in the front end. i will start the ball rolling by suggesting that the problem is the engine, either the configuration, it being a Desmo V4, or the physical size, or it's weight, preventing the chassis people from being able to position it where they want in any of the various frame configurations tried so far. i know Honda had a V5, and currently also run a V4, but i suspect they were/are probably physically smaller & probably lighter than Ducati's V4. In an article elsewhere on this forum it says that Stoner asked Ducati for a change to the bike that was flatly refused, and he won't say what it was, could he have asked them to drop the Iconic Desmo? All we know for sure is that some of the best brains & talent in the business have failed to make it work with what they have at their disposal. Discuss.
Well.... I have to say that there have been an awful lot of threads dealing with this subject and the answer has been: Not knowing anything about building the race bike, having a lot of third hand information and being rooted to a sofa, it's not over-surprising that no one knows any better than the experts who are being paid to fix the problem. It's always great being an armchair expert, but let's face it, if Ducati saw your CV, they wouldn't be offering you a job as a racebike guru. We really know bugger all about it, except that if it was at all easy to fix, it would have been by now. And now for my armchair punditry comment: quite apart from Stoner on the bike, the year the Ducati won, it was using tyres no one else had which suited it. This is no longer the case. If a manufacturer made tyres especially for the Desmo, might not the front end problems go away? God, I'm just so fucking wise. Now, where is the Ducati HR address?
. [/QUOTE] I too have read all those threads and draw a conclusion from the armchair pundits I reckon you are right and I know bu***r all
Ducati just tested a new frame and swingarm and still they are 1.5 secs off the pace at misano According to Furusawa the balance point on the gp12 is totally wrong!
Was wondering when someone would get around to this. My own personal belief is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the steering head trail/rake angle. It's hard to explain why I think this other than every time I look at the bike no matter who is riding it, the front end geometry just looks wrong and out of kilter. Not by much admittedly, but by enough to think, yeah it's not right that bike. I think we're talking very fine degrees of adjustment to get it just so but it is obviously proving more difficult than anyone anticipated. They must have tried infinite settings and such like all to no avail, I was surprised when sometime ago they lengthened the swinging arm to try and compensate for the problem. I'm not convinced by the L90 degree angle engine being 'wrong' for racing, it's just 'different' and as such needs a different approach from whoever is riding it and designing the chassis. Any Ducati rider has to do that be it an L twin or L four ...... it's the bikes very nature. WSB history says they have it right, at least until present. Again, personally, I'm not convinced the twin-spar chassis is the right partner for the engine, it's the antithesis of the Ducati ethos, and as such should be binned without further notice, if it worked or they could get it to work I would begrudgingly accept it. It doesn't. Sack it. Which leaves us where we were before. Back to carbon/alloy mono structure or the tried and trusted trellis way. I'm still in favour of the carbon/alloy mono structure believing it to be a interesting and viable option to trellis or twin-spar frames. A third way if you like. Once they get the bloody geometry sorted out.
I think you might be on to something Glidd. I was watching a program on )admittedly) F1 racing recently and they said that in the 50's a set of tyres would last 1/2 a season whereas today in F1 and MotoGP a set of tyres can be wrecked in a few laps; one of the biggest performance differentiators does seem to come down to how the tyres are 'used'. The use of 'control' tyres is therefore a means by which one team can be favoured over another, particularly if the specification of those tyres are changed mid season, which I believe they were recently (?).
A correct well sorted chassis will run well on an abundance of different tyres, just because the Bridgestones don't work on the Ducati doesn't mean its down solely to the tyres, a shite chassis will trash tyres in minutes. Remember VR's from a couple of races back?
Aye :smile: it makes no sense at all does it? Apart from the engine and aero package I'd be tempted to throw the thing away and start again with anything other than what they have now. Couldn't be much worse , could it?
Fack me, I bet those Ducati designers and engineers are shitting themselves with the font of knowledge here. "Ey Guiseppe I canna get the shassee to a work" "Ah, Alberto, you a need to a speek to a forum member on a engleesh forum"
As for "couldn't be much worse" - you have to compare the current lap times with previous years' lap times. It might be rubbish compared to what Honda and Yam are now producing (which, admittedly is somewhat important in racing...) but it isn't rubbish compared to what Ducati produced in past seasons.
MF: No. I cannot disclose the information related to the Yamaha, and we didn’t discuss anything in the details. I have just explained them about my approach and the way of thinking, especially what I had done in 2004. For example, ‘centroid triangle’ - which is a triangle made from front and rear contact point with the ground and the center of the gravity of the bike - shouldn’t be shaped like this or that (gestures with his fingers to show the vertex goes too far to the front or rear side). Or, when they refer to the suspension, they always measure and express with the ‘stiffness’. But, my approach is different. I would take a look at a ’frequency’ of suspensions and try to make the front and rear frequencies as close to the same as possible. It makes the weight-transfer of the bike smoother. Although they are just generalities, I could manage with our bikes in those scientific approaches. What I explained to Filippo was those kinds of ideas of mine and the way of thinking. And I asked him why he had called me. If I joined them and got good results, it would prove his previous developments had been wrong. Or, if I joined them and couldn’t do any good, it would also prove his decision was wrong. I asked him ‘Either way, it will be inevitable that you have to take responsibility. How come you have to take such a big risk?’ Filippo immediately answered with composure. ‘It doesn’t matter if I lose my position. I don’t care at all. All that I care is one thing; to make our bike better.’ When I heard his remarks I thought in my mind ‘Filippo, you have a real Samurai spirit…’
Well, in theory, there is no "of course" about it. Would a 1400 cc Ducati have a faster lap time than a 1000? Would a 2 litre Ducati? The thing puts out so much horsepower now that it's barely exploitable. Isn't that part of the problem, perhaps? Maybe a 900 would be the sweet spot. But as I have already pointed out, I know bugger-all about it.
thats alllright mate, dont bother reading and learning, just make up the usual bullshoit internet expert opinion and the jobs a good un.......
