MotoGP is being battered by its own rule book

There’s something a little bogus about this proximity: to do with the winners (always the same guys) preserving limited fuel and control tyres that don’t like being punished earlier in the race.

But something else has come along with the ever-increasing number of pages in the rule book. It is a bad atmosphere, underlined with a first-ever mass protest, which (after being over-ruled by the on-track stewards) went all the way to the Court of Appeal. Where it was again overturned.

On the face of it, it seems significant that this action – something quite new in the two-wheeled sphere – coincided with the arrival direct from the ranks of F1 of a new team chief. The new CEO of Aprilia Racing, Massimo Rivola, is ex-Ferrari. He heads a factory squad currently struggling to regain strength after losing their genius engineer Gigi Dall’Igna to Ducati five years ago.

If Rivola wasn’t the moving force behind the original protest against Ducati (Aprilia were joined by Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha and KTM – everyone except Yamaha), he was certainly the most sore loser after it failed. A stinging interview described the rules and their policing as “a joke”.

It seemed that the newbie was shooting at the wrong target. Uniquely in major motorsport, MotoGP’s technical regulations are written by the manufacturers themselves, by their MSMA (Motor Sports Manufacturers Association), where even more unusually all decisions have to be unanimous.

It took a wonderfully oblique move (some might say marvellously Japanese) by Honda to reveal that it was not the rules at fault, but the all-powerful FIM Technical Director Danny Aldridge, and his wording of the guidelines to manufacturers on how he plans to implement those rules. These left a loophole. And typically Ducati chief Dall’Igna went straight through it.

Dall’Igna is noted for his creative approach to blind-siding the regulations. Upon his arrival in 2008, he made a bold move to free Ducati from the testing and technical restrictions applied to factory teams, opting out of “Factory” status to join the private teams in the new-that-year “Open” category. It triggered a quick rewrite of the rules.

Since then, under his guidance, Ducati has become competitive again, while pioneering downforce aerodynamics. He has frequently railed against the introduction of increasingly restrictive aero rules, which now allow only rudimentary wings on the fairing flanks.

This year he did something about it, introducing an all-new spoiler located under the front of the rear-suspension swing-arm. This little chin-piece seems to fly in the face of regulations banning all other devices creating downforce.

Ducati preserved the mystery about its purpose even as Dovizioso (and two other Ducati riders) used it at Qatar. Was it, as some thought, a scoop to direct cooling air to the rear tyre? Or was it there to sidestep the aero regulations, and provide downforce? Dall’Igna wasn’t saying. All that mattered was that Aldridge had approved the device.

Directly after the race came the mass protest. It was promptly over-ruled; the protesters appealed, and so it went to the Appeals Court.

There, much to Dall’Igna’s chagrin, Ducati were obliged to reveal all. Backed by computer-modelled evidence, they asserted that it was a cooling device, dropping rear tyre temperature by as much as seven degrees (and thereby delaying the drop-off that blights the end of races). It did also generate downforce… but a negligible amount, estimated at a paltry 300g at 180 km/h.

But it didn’t matter, because it was secondary. A side-effect. Aldridge’s guidelines to the rules allowed addenda to the swing-arm, as long as the primary purpose was not aerodynamic.

The protesters insisted that they hadn’t want to strip Ducati of victory, but simply sought clarification of the rules. This seemed specious, especially given Rivola’s ill-tempered press briefing at the next race in Argentina.

It took a far more subtle move by Honda to reveal the true nature of the controversy, revealing the loophole and the inconsistency, and demonstrating that the guidelines need to be redrafted as a matter of urgency.

On Thursday at the Argentine race, they proposed their own very similar under-swing-arm device, telling Aldridge that the main purpose was to generate downforce. It was therefore immediately disallowed.

The next day, they came back with exactly the same design, but the purpose had changed overnight. Now the primary goal was to improve stiffness of the swing-arm. And according to his own guidelines, Aldridge was obliged to approve its use.

Significantly, Honda didn’t fit it. Its real primary purpose had already been served.

Photography courtesy of Motorsport Images.