Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128346
By MICHAEL IN THIE PADDOCK SCOTT What Happened? he obv ious topic of the hour is the awe so me ne ss o f Vale nt ino Rossi: his talent, his re so lve and his skill at d ismantling his rivals. But we all knew that already. His towering perfo rmance at Sep ang in the Malaysian Grand Prix impr esse d m ight ily, but it did not surprise . Much mo re surprising things have happen ed e lsew he re , bot h in Malaysia and throug hout the season . Few less so than th e way Ducati has gone backwards. Ninth in the champ ionship with Loris Capirossi is better than any other make has managed, apa rt from Honda and Yamaha (at a ratio of 6-to -2). But both Suzuki and Kawasaki have made mar ked impr ove me nts this year, in a season whe re the whole standard has risen . And last year Capiross i was fourth ove rall after winning a race - and Troy Bayliss was sixth . So what has gone wrong? Well, the ove rall sta ndard definitely has gone up. At Sep ang, for insta nce, the first 14 qualifiers w e re inside last year's lap record. And w hile th is year's Ducatis are more pow erful than last year's and generally qualif y and lap faster than last year 's, it is ob viously not by eno ugh. It is far from ce rta in that the 2004 bike is actua lly tha t m uch better. Neil Hodgson and Rube n Xaus are on 2003 bikes , run on a shoestring by the low-rent d'Ant in team. Th e British e x-World Superbi ke Cha mpion has had a night mare se ason, with a series of bizarre failings. The rear brake calipe r fell off in one race, a britt le o ld fuel bre ather pipe snappe d in Po rt ugal, his crew dropp ed th e bike in the pit before th e race at Q atar, and in Malaysia it act ually caught fire on the sighting lap. But Xaus has had a more favo rable experience, possibly not unco nnected with the fact that he is a Spanish rider in a Spanish team. At trac ks whe re he had previous expe rience - Catalunya and Assen - he beat both the factory bikes. And at T the o nly track where nobody had any expe rience, Qatar, he not only did that , but finished third - Ducati's first rostrum this year. At th is po int, the re is so me doubt whe ther the d'Ant in te am will have eno ugh spare parts to finish the season at all, w ith co mponents alrea dy over mileage, and break ages and failures gettingwo rse . Yet it still has the edge , where directly co mparable, o n the high-re nt facto ry squad - recipients of the coveted Marlboro millions. Never mind Marlbo ro 's misfortunate tendency to back losers - mainly Yamaha but also Moden as, in their really bad early two -stroke years - ever since it last won the title with Wayne Rainey in 1992. The re is mor e than just some kind of bigmoney juju at work. And there is an increas ing body of opinion among rival e nginee rs th at the fault lays not in Ducati's sponsors, but in itself. Or, to be more specific, in its unique way of building a MotoGP bike. In a grid full of machines that , but for the unsuccessful Proton, confo rm to a particular te chnic al formu la, the Des mos ed ici is a he re tic. And unless Ducati can pull something out of the bag to prove every bod y wrong, it is a costly heresy. All the others make the ir chassis out of aluminium fabrications. The Ducati uses tr iangulate d steel tubes. All the ot he rs have chassis that stret ch from steering hea d to sw ingarm pivot, hanging the eng ine off underneat h. The Ducati has just a subframe up front and uses the engine as a stressed mem ber. And none of the others pivot the swingarm directly off the e ngine casings. T his last charact e ristic has one obvious drawback: It is e xtremely difficult to adjust the pos ition of the swingarm pivot w ithout redesigning the whol e engine . If you're geometry is unfavourable, you're stuc k with it. The Honda also dispenses with adjustme nt at th is point, but variation is re lative ly easily achieved by knoc king up a new chassis, as it does from time to time. The n there is the question of controlled flex, a key elem e nt of good handling. This ca n be en gineered into a www.cyclenews.com chassis with different wall th icknesse s o r inte rnal bracing, or indeed relative ly minor de sign changes. Ducati can do the same with its swingarm and w ith its fro nt subframe. But if you enginee r flex into e ngine casings, they 'll soo n be pouri ng oil out of every crack and crevice. Finally, the re are the desmodromic valves. Last year, they looked clever. Th is year, not so , as Hond a (for one) has raised its rev ceiling above I 6,000 - without any problems from its good old valve sp rings. At one point , Ducati had Fer rari on board as tec hnical cons ultants. Ducati was told that to achieve the revs needed to keep increasing the power, it would ne e d pneumatic va lve springs and/or hydraulic actu ation. Ferrari was promptly shown the door. Ducatis are exciting because they are differe nt . Stopwatches are less easily impressed . And unless Ducati can do so mething to prove everybody wrong, then its or iginality begins to look mo re li ke pig-headedness. eN CYCLE NEWS • O a OBER 20, 2004 107