Ducati’s best of times, Honda’s worst of times

Meanwhile Honda became GP racing’s superpower, dominating the 1960s, taking a decade out, then returning in the 1980s and rising to dominate again.

By the time Ducati unleashed its first Desmosedici MotoGP bike at Suzuka, Japan, in April 2003, Honda had won 191 premier-class GPs and 26 riders and constructors titles, while Ducati had won a big, fat nothing.

How times change. Since Honda’s captain (as Honda calls its six-times MotoGP king Marc Márquez) got hurt at the start of 2020 the company has won four GPs and zero titles, while Ducati has won 28 GPs, one riders’ crown and three constructors’ championships.

So far this season Ducati has won seven GPs and taken 11 further podiums, Honda has had one win (at COTA, a case of the RC213V fitting the track and Álex Rins loving the track) and no other GP podiums, while KTM and Aprilia have taken no wins and two podiums each and Yamaha has taken just one podium. That gives Ducati a 75% share of the podiums at the first eight races!

This is how the world works – no empire lasts forever.

In the ten years since Gigi Dall’Igna (Ducati’s 21st century Taglioni) arrived at Ducati the company has transformed itself from paddock joke – not a single victory in the 100 races between October 2010 and August 2016 – to MotoGP overlord. In effect, the Italian marque and the Japanese brand have traded places.

Why is Ducati’s Desmosedici so good now? Because Dall’Igna has worked like a Formula 1 engineer, delving deeper to find advantages than any MotoGP engineer before him. This process required venturing into areas which the rulebook never knew existed: downforce aerodynamics, hydraulic ride-height adjusters, mass dampers and so on.

The Desmosedici first became the definitive MotoGP bike (it never was when Stoner raced it, he just made it do things no one else could) in 2021, when the usual off-season tweaks plus a ground-effect fairing, with diffusers, finally completed the package: the bike was super-fast, stopped well and finally turned well.

This year it’s better everywhere, not by much, but enough. According to world champion Pecco Bagnaia the GP23 is improved in braking and entering, has better handling and more grip traction.

Its braking advantage comes from somehow reducing forward pitch, so riders can really use the rear tyre to stop the bike. And exiting corners the bike can transfer an amazing amount of torque to the ground exiting corners without spinning too much.

Then, of course, there’s the factor of having eight bikes on the grid, for the second year running, which means Ducati can gather twice as much data as Aprilia, Honda and KTM and four times as much as Yamaha.

The advantage gained through strength in numbers has been increased this year, because the new sprint-race format reduces practice time, which is a bigger blow for the brands with fewer bikes.

Ducati is also way ahead of the others in computer simulation and computer modelling, two important technologies, which increase in importance as practice time decreases.

To undertake effective computer modelling – via building computer models of every part of the motorcycle – requires a vast amount of data.

Ducati is also using machine learning to improve the performance of its riders. Machine-learning algorithms use data to predict outcomes, which helps engineers find answers to problems more quickly, a real bonus during tightly packed race-weekend schedules. And using this kind of tech speeds the process even further by allowing engineers to access data quicker than before.

It’s for all these reasons that Ducati rules MotoGP, with seven wins from the first eight races of 2023 and five riders in the top six of the championship.

Meanwhile Honda’s top rider is Rins in 13th, even though the Spaniard hasn’t raced since breaking a leg during the Mugello sprint race in early June. Lack of speed isn’t Honda’s only problem. Three of its four riders missed the last GP at Assen through injury: Rins, Márquez and new Repsol team-mate Mir, who has been absent since breaking a finger during Mugello practice.

So what exactly is wrong with the RC213V? The machine has always been a razor-blade of a MotoGP bike, requiring very special talents to extract its maximum. Márquez did that like magic for seven years and his last title success, in 2019, was the best premier-class campaign in history.

However, MotoGP technology have moved on since then and Honda hasn’t kept up. Last year Márquez complained that the bike didn’t have front feel, didn’t turn and couldn’t accelerate, because it had no grip.

The bike is the same this year, maybe worse, because sometimes when you’re in a deep, deep hole it’s easy to make mistakes while trying to dig yourself out. Ducati did a lot of this trying to dig itself out of its hole years ago.

The RC213V’s engine presumably makes power in the wrong way, which also means it won’t help stop the bike, plus the chassis gives little feel, it’s not got enough downforce aero and its electronics – traction control and so on – seem to be a particular issue at the moment. This might explain some of the many crashes suffered by Honda’s four riders, including fourth-man Takaaki Nakagami, who stands 16th overall, even though he’s the only Honda rider who’s been at every race.

Quite simply, the RC213V needs a major redesign. In fact what Honda needs for next year is an RC214V.

And what about the three other manufacturers? How have they come along since the start of the 2023 season?

KTM has been the big surprise of 2023, with a completely redesigned RC16, even though the bike doesn’t look much different from last year’s. The bike’s biggest improvement has been in its hydraulic ride-height device, which delivers missile-like starts and super-strong corner exits.

The engine is also more powerful and more rideable, which is one reason Brad Binder took the all-time MotoGP top-speed record at Mugello, at 227mph/366.1kmh. That mind-boggling number was also helped by KTM’s in-season aero upgrade, which did away with the ground-effect diffusers for less drag and improved braking stability.

The RC16 does have some advantages over the Ducati: better front-end feel and it’s easier for the riders to put the bike wherever they want, however they want.

Aprilia had an amazing 2022 and was expected to challenge Ducati in 2023 but so far that hasn’t happened. Aleix Espargaró says the latest RS-GP is 3% or 4% better, but that’s not enough to keep up with Ducati, or KTM at some tracks.

The bike works much better around fast, flowing layouts than stop-and-go circuits. Its main problem so far has been starts – the bike usually gets swamped by rivals, which leaves Espargaró and Maverick Viñales deep in the pack, where their front tyres overheat, making overtaking more difficult than ever. Espargaró did make a good start in the last GP, at Assen, so perhaps Aprilia is on its way to fixing that problem.

Yamaha is currently doing even worse than Honda, sitting last in the constructors title chase. Its best result so far is one third place, achieved at COTA by 2021 champ Fabio Quartararo, whose next best result is a couple of seventh places.

Yamaha’s big problem is that it’s lost the only advantage the YZR-M1 had – excellent corner speed, which gave excellent corner-exit speed.

Yamaha worked hard on horsepower for 2023, but while it’s found top speed (Quartararo was only 1.3mph/2.1km/h slower than the best Ducati during the Italian GP at Mugello) the engine is more aggressive, so the M1 ties itself in knots exiting corners, forcing riders to roll off the throttle. More top speed is good, but less acceleration out of every corner is very, very bad.

This year’s M1 engine is a Yamaha development, so Yamaha’s only hope is that former Ferrari F1 engine Luca Marmorini can work some miracles for 2024. Otherwise the company’s MotoGP future doesn’t look at all bright.