Ducati spoiler, the figures are in: -7° and +300 grams of downforce…

To get his victory before the FIM Court of Appeal, Luigi Dall'Igna had to explain to the plaintiffs, i.e. Aprilia, Honda, Suzuki and KTM, what the spoiler fixed under the swingarm of the Ducati GP19 really caused.

But for this, assertions were not enough: Evidence was needed!

These were revealed to the FIM, but also to the competition present at the audience, in the best possible form, namely numerical results, and it is certainly because these results are now in the possession of its adversaries that the boss of Ducati Corse made them public on Friday, during a press conference held at the Ducati Hospitality at Termas de Rio Hondo.

Gigi Dall'Igna: “It works well to get some air to the rear tire, and the results of our testing, in Qatar before the race, are that we can reduce the tire temperature by about 7 degrees on average. This is, in Ducati’s opinion, an important result in terms of motorcycle performance.”

The downforce is not zero but remains an almost negligible side effect, especially if we compare it to the forty kilos of downforce generated by the Ducati wings in 2016...

“The spoiler that Yamaha used at the end of last year also had this side effect. In our case, I think we can tell you that we have more or less 3 or 4 Newtons at 180 km/h, or more or less 300 grams. Ducati had this idea by copying Yamaha. Because Yamaha used a system like this in Valencia, and maybe also before in some tests, but for sure in the race in Valencia. So Ducati had this idea to look at what one of our competitors was doing. I think others will copy us.”

“Honestly, we had not carried out any wind tunnel tests with the system, because our objective was not the support exerted by the device. It was just the thermal effect on the rear tire. We therefore produced our test results, during the test in Qatar, with the appropriate tests on the racing bike as well as our simulations in terms of heat exchange coefficient with the rear tire.

The Italian engineer obviously deplores this affair, as well as the reluctance of other manufacturers to develop the aerodynamics of motorcycles...

“Ducati Corse only devotes 1% of its budget to aerodynamics. So if we cut anything out of it, it's ridiculous compared to other costs in MotoGP. For the lawyer and everything that happened at the Court of Appeal, we spent about five days in the wind tunnel. In 2018, we developed our MotoGP fairing with ten days in the wind tunnel. So, 50% of the wind tunnel budget was used up just for the Court of Appeal. I think the call cost is too cheap. €1300 for the appeal and €600 for the protest. So I think it's nothing if you compare it to the total cost of going to the Court of Appeal.”

As for Aprilia, the main initiator of this call…

“Honestly, I'm not sure they presented anything to the technical director. I think they only sent an email to the technical director to see if they should homologate the water deflector like the one Yamaha used in Valencia. But I didn't see any coins. But you have to talk to Aprilia and the technical director about it. I read something during the hearing, so I have my idea, but I can't tell you everything, because it's not in the hearing report.”