We have all heard many times that the competition teams use the training to prepare the bike, which is done in any of the three categories of the MotoGP World Championship. But thanks to Marc Márquez’s Repsol team we are now going to know a little more. Although do not expect to know secrets how many clicks is the fork or what is the tarrado of the rear shock absorber.
The set-up work really starts on the Thursday before the race, at which time data from other years, whether races or trainings, are rescued from the archive. In this way the first parameters of the motorcycle are configured. For example, if the circuit has large braking, the configuration sought is the one that offers more stability in that situation.
Of course, things are not so simple, because a competition bike is a real rolling laboratory in which you can configure almost everything. In addition, changing one point can vary (to worse) another. In the words of Santi Hernández, the technical director of the team, by varying the geometry of the bike you can facilitate the turn in a curve, but at the same time you can lose stability when braking. That’s why the objective of the team is to achieve an ideal balance on the bike that allows easy handling without damaging other aspects too much.
Of course, all these changes and configurations have no meaning without the pilot. That ultimately is the one that goes up on the bike and the one that proves that every change made on the bike is convenient. There Santi Hernández does the job of interpreter between the mechanics and the pilot. He is the one who listens to the sensations of Marc (always in English) and transmits them to the mechanics so that they make the necessary adjustments.
Although not only the sensations of the pilot are used, there is also the telemetry data, which are the impartial judges that say whether that is working correctly or not. Marc Márquez’s motorcycle controls no less than 117 parameters, allowing you to visualize (through the graphics produced by the data collected) the braking, the behavior of the front or rear suspension, the acceleration or how much the rear wheel skid . In addition, they also have programs capable of simulating the results of some changes made before the pilot tests them.
The best thing is that all these adjustments and details require that on Sunday the rider will get on the bike and hand it over to win races. If during all the weekend all this work has not been carried out correctly, the pilot will hardly be able to win or simply to do it well. But the one that really will take the laurels will be him, now if during the race something fails on the bike, those who will take away all the faults will be the suffering mechanics.
But not only Marc Márquez and his team have been talked about this week to get the Moto2 World Championship. There are some publications that are accusing Marc Márquez’s team of cheating. Although precisely Mike Webb has come out to defend the work of the Moto2 champion team, which seems to clear any doubts that may be thrown on the Moto2 championship achieved this year.
Specifically in Speedweek, a magazine of the German engine, accuse the team that they are using an illegal injection map that allows to continue injecting gasoline into the cylinders when the pilot acts on the system of rapid change, the so-called Quick Shift. So when the pilot opens the gas and there is gasoline in the cylinders and hence the flashing accelerations of the pilot and his mount throughout the season. Always according to Speedweek, that illegal map would be loaded into the motorcycle’s ECU (ECU that is standard for all and inviolable by regulation) on the starting grid and would be erased as soon as the engine shuts down.
According to the words of Mike Webb, the race director and partly responsible for controlling that nothing irregular happens on the bikes, what I just told you is irrelevant as well as incorrect. According to the technicians who work with him, loading a self-erasing map is impossible. And in what corresponds to the Quick Shift there is no limitation, since it is not considered as an integral part of the engine and can be configured as you want the equipment. In any case, this rapid gear change system has already been sent to the technical director, HRC and Geo Tech (the engine trainers) for approval. As all teams do.
So it seems that all those accusations that have been made have no basis, since everything they present as illegal is reflected and allowed in the regulations. Although as icing on all this, the response from the team has been that if someone has any questions about your bike, ask in the next race that it is revised completely. Will we see Marc’s motorbike disemboweled in the next Valencia race or will the accusers be silent, letting their accusation continue to grow without any foundation?
See that they have tried to knock down the merits of Marc Márquez and his team throughout his short but brilliant career in the World Cup. And look where, nobody has ever managed to transform any of these accusations into reality. Is envy so bad? Anyway we will be attentive to what happens in the pits this weekend we will not see someone with pliers des-sealing the bike to check that everything is in place.
Motorpasionmoto.com
