News in this morning that Ducati is rushing its 2012 chassis into service this weekend at Assen, stung by criticism (from within and without) of its dismal performance so far this season. The bike to be called, in fluent geek-speak, the GP11.1 will feature a variation of Honda’s quick-shift gearbox but, more importantly, will have the 2012 swingarm and rear suspension setup which is covered in detail in the technical article I posted earlier on today. Basically it means that the suspension will no longer be pivoted on the rear of the gear box but will become “fully floating” and will be pivoted on a sub-frame under the tailpiece (JUST like the Yamaha M1 has….:) )
This is supposed to give much better rear end “feel” and aid in getting temperature into the rear tyre sooner.
These mods were not supposed to be brought online just yet and Ducati admit that they are taking a big risk running a totally untested bike at such a prestigious round of the championship, but, they HAVE to try something. Apparently Marlboro (Phillip Morris) is getting pretty peeved with lack of results. There is no word as to whether both riders will have the new tackle but I’m expecting that to filter down soon.
Apropos CRT (see earlier article), it does seem that the FIM is going to be a little less draconian with the new class and allow entrants to choose their own engines. This is more in keeping with the “prototype” ethos of the class. Let’s hope that the powers that be restrain their urges to over-regulate and allow open-slather development of these production-based engines. So far it seems that we will have at least one BMW-powered bike as well as one using the Aprilia V4. There is even talk that one of the teams is talking to Kawasaki.
I had a nice chat with Chris Dowde this morning. Chris has been a “guru” of motorcycle road racing in Australia for many, many years and his list of accomplishments in the engineering field are too long to record. Chris is rebuilding my swingarm so I took the photo album down so that he could have a look at photos of the bike in its racing day. There are all sorts of fascinating projects under various covers in his workshop. I could tell you all about some of them, but then I’d have to kill you so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
