MotoGP News: Ducati handling the new engine regulations
The MotoGP crew chiefs of all participating teams are facing one common conundrum: How to manage engine performance through practice sessions to ensure that the rider gets good track times and yet, maintain a fresh and fast engine to compete in the race?
These problems surfaced after exceedingly strict engine limitations and regulations have been imposed for the 2010 MotoGP. Mika Kallio’s crew chief and Pramac Ducati's Technical Director Fabio Sterlacchini explained how the Ducati team is handling the limited number of engines. The art is to shuffle the engines in such a way that the rider always ends up with a strong engine for the race which would ensure his best performance.
According to Fabio Sterlacchini, they follow a schedule; they manage the life of the engine and monitor the mileage. Mileage is the key factor which determines the reusability of the engine. At the start of the MotoGP 2010 season at Qatar, the Pramac Ducati riders started with two new engines, one for each bike they were racing with. When an engine attained a certain level of mileage it was decided to be shelved not raced. There are two factors governing the shelving decision of the engines; engine performance issues and safety. Overworked and driven engines have a tendency to underperform and blow up like that of Jorge Lorenzo’s Yamaha at Sachsenring.
There are more than safety reasons to consider in such expensive engine blowups. The teams do their best to avoid such situation as when the engine gets destroyed, so does the invaluable information contained within it. This information is extremely effective and is used for study and improvement of the bike. According to Sterlacchini the revision of engines at Ducati is quite critical and acts as a catalyst of improvement. When an engine is destroyed, so are the parts that need to change on it. Moreover, the shelved engines are also stored as backups, incase of an engine loss or a crash these engines come in handy.
This too poses a problem, in case you need it to last the life for rest of the engines; it will under perform. Hence this not the solution which is preferred at Ducati, when an engine has reached its limit its sent back for revision and analysis which help in the rectification of any problems that might have arisen in the engine design. There is no rocket science to managing engines except to extend their running life as much as possible. However, the new engines need to have a few hundred kilometers on them to loosen up before they are raced.
Kallio's crew chief explained that they used another engine in Mugello and managed a better solution. A completely new engine in the beginning has to pass the tests on the engine test bench to check the difference in terms of performance. As the parts are new, the friction within the engine is on the higher side especially in the first phase of engine life so as it happens to be that an engine with 800km on it would be capable of better performance than a completely new one. So, the Ducati team installed the new engine and used it during practice to loosen it up, so they managed to loosen it up in FP2, QP, WUP and Race.
However, there is a catch to it; if a performance drop comes around in any of the qualifiers or practice sessions, then a new engine has to be reinstalled for the race. Ducati specifically has been criticized and questions have been raised on its desmodromic valve train system. Intensive and extensive maintenance is required to keep up the engine performance as compared to the usual bucket and shim systems used on the pneumatically operated valve systems. However the crew chief adamantly maintained that the desmodromic valve train system of the Ducati did not pose any problems and will not create any in the future.
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