MotoGP is all about doing everything as fast as you can, whether you’re on track or in pit lane. Which begs the question – why do you see mechanics going to all the bother of changing brake discs and calipers every time they change a front wheel?
This even happens on the grid, when mechanics sometimes change the front wheel after the sighting lap, while their rider sits on the bike, getting into the zone before the warm-up lap. Which begs another question – why do they change the front wheel at this very stressful time?
Three reasons…
KTM has various clever tricks, saving seconds that can be spent on track.
First, at high fuel consumption tracks – like Losail, Red Bull Ring and Motegi – riders come very close to running out of fuel at the end of the race, so they ride the sighting lap as slowly as possible, to save fuel. This means they don’t get much heat into the tyres, so the sighting-lap tyres are swapped for fully heated tyres, straight out of their tyre warmers.
Second, at tracks where tyre life is an issue, changing the tyres on the grid reduces tyre use by one lap, which might not sound much, but at the end of a race it could save the rider a few tenths or a few seconds.
Third, if the rider gets a bad feeling from the front tyre during the sighting lap he will ask for a new front wheel and tyre, just to be sure.
And then there are the reasons why mechanics must change discs and calipers whenever they change a front wheel.
The start of the process: fender off, dry-brake lines disconnected, calipers attached to discs
Oxley
“During a session when you’re using one spec of front tyre and you want to change to a new tyre or a different spec, you’d think it’d save time having the new tyre already waiting with discs fitted, wouldn’t you?” says Mark Lloyd, who works on Brad Binder’s Red Bull KTM RC16s. “But we always move discs and calipers across to the new wheel because the brakes are hot, the calipers are hot and the rider’s got a feeling with those brakes.
“We feel that the few seconds you lose swapping them over in the garage you regain out on track, where the rider knows he can go straight on the gun because the brakes are still warm. Also, with the new [since 2020] finned Brembo calipers it takes a bit more time to get heat into them when they’re cold. Plus, of course, you always want to keep the discs and pads as matched sets, so you know you’re not going to get any vibration from the brakes.
“The other thing is that the 340mm discs we use nearly all the time are too big to get the wheel out with the calipers in situ, so we have to remove the calipers anyway. And the only time we use 320mm discs is at Phillip Island, because there’s hardly any braking there.”
Lloyd and Daniel Petak remove the discs/calipers from the ‘old’ wheel, in its wheel stand. Tyre warmer keeps the tyre hot in case it’s needed later
Oxley
Lloyd and his fellow mechanics have the operation down to a fine art and KTM has made various detail changes to the front-end to make front-wheel changes even quicker.
“It’s usually three of us doing it, so we can do it super-quick,” adds Lloyd, who used to work for the Castrol Honda and Repsol Honda WSB and MotoGP teams. “We do it once or twice most sessions, especially in FP3, when you really need to go for a time attack at the end to get into Q2. It’s easiest when we’re not running disc covers, because when we’ve got disc covers we have to remove the front fender, then the covers.”
