2026 is the 25th anniversary of MotoGP’s switch to big four-strokes, the championship’s biggest technical revolution of all time. Honda’s RC211V was the best motorcycle on that historic 2002 grid, but which was the year’s wildest MotoGP bike?
Aprilia’s mighty 2002 RS Cube looked like it wanted to hurt you. And its looks didn’t lie.
Aprilia’s first four-stroke MotoGP bike may have been a failure, but I’d argue that it was the wildest – and the coolest – motorcycle on MotoGP’s first 990cc grid.
Even though the RS Cube never scored a victory or even a podium, it did make history. On Saturday 1 June 2002, the inline-triple became the first 990 to break the 200mph barrier, when factory Aprilia rider Regis Laconi clocked 200.27mph during Italian Grand Prix practice at Mugello. True, Tohru Ukawa and his Honda RC211V hit 201.63mph a few minutes later, but that little bit of history will always belong to the Noale brand.
Laconi was a sight to behold whenever he climbed aboard the Cube. And whenever he returned to pitlane…
“Each time Laconi climbs off the bike he looks like he’s gone ten rounds with some mythical six-headed monster,” I wrote at the time. “Eyes bulging and sweat glistening, Laconi then mimes the experience of riding the 220-horsepower Cube as a horseman might act out a wild-stallion ride toward the apocalypse: arms straining from their sockets as he’s dragged towards the horizon at a terrifying rate, with seemingly little control over his destiny.”
Lack of horsepower certainly wasn’t the Cube’s problem; the big concern was transferring its 220 horses to the racetrack.
“It wanted to kill you everywhere,” says Jeremy McWilliams, who raced the Cube in 2004. “It made lots of horsepower but in all the wrong places. I think it broke every one of my ribs twice that year.”
But who cares about trifling nuisances like a few broken bones when the Cube was the loudest and best-sounding motorcycle of MotoGP’s new four-stroke era?
A wide-eyed Regis Laconi aboard Aprilia’s 2002 RS Cube
Aprilia
“The Earth moves every time the Cube rumbles past,” I wrote in 2002, getting a little carried away. “The Cube sounds wonderful, like a tumult of bellowing bassoons at the front of an ancient army, weaponry glinting in the sunlight as it rushes onward towards the gates of Hades.”
Aprilia loved the fact that fans adored the bike because it sounded so good. “Our first target is always performance,” Aprilia engineer Jan Witteveen told me. “But I also believe that the emotion of the fans, and of the people who work with the bike, is important.”
The Cube also looked super-cool. Its shark-like look was created in CFD, a virtual wind tunnel, then tested in real life at military airbases in northern Italy, where its datalogging measured a top speed of 205mph.
“But that’s not a real speed because it was measured at the rear wheel, and you get a lot of tyre slip [spin] at that kind of speed,” added Witteveen.
The Cube could’ve gone even faster, but Aprilia’s chief aerodynamicist Corrado Ficuccello didn’t design its bodywork for minimal drag. In so doing, he was pointing a way to MotoGP’s downforce aero future.
Around that time, CFD and wind-tunnel work were telling aerodynamicists that while super-slippery bodywork makes motorcycles faster on the straights, it makes them slower through the corners, which is where the lap time is really made. How come?
Aprilia weren’t the only people that had worked this out. So had Team Roberts engineer Tom O’Kane, who had spent time in the Lotus F1 wind tunnel, trying to make the Roberts KR3 500 more slippery, in an effort to minimise the bike’s power handicap against the 990s, but the bike became a pig in the turns.
The Cube engine was basically three cylinders off a ten-cylinder three-litre F1 engine
“We found that blindly chasing after low drag coefficient doesn’t help,” said O’Kane. “Almost everything you do to decrease drag increases lift, which is obviously going to affect the bike’s ability to go round corners.”
Honda had also worked this out. When Valentino Rossi first tested the RC211V in 2001 he complained that the fairing was too small, so he was struggling to stay on the bike at high speeds.
“Valentino complained a lot because he grew up with Aprilia, who use much bigger fairings,” said RC211V project leader Tomoo Shiozaki. “But we explained the handling benefits of our concept and finally he understood. We knew that a large cowling causes heavier handling and lift.”
Aprilia took the next step with their Cube in 2003, signing twice World Superbike champion Colin Edwards, whose first outing on the bike, at Jerez in November 2002, ended with a major get-off after just four laps.
“It was like, ‘Hmm, what have I got myself into?’” he said.
Edwards grew to love and hate the Cube in equal measure…
“I thought I knew what fast was until I got with this thing and it tried to loop out on me in fifth gear, it’s got some beans, for sure!” he said halfway through 2003. “You take a bull, you cut off its balls, dangle them in front of its face, then climb on its back.”
When an offer came to ride a Honda RC211V in 2004, Edwards didn’t hesitate twice. His place was taken by McWilliams, who signed a two-year deal with Aprilia, but only got a year with the bike, because the project was shut down at the end of the year. Aprilia had been bought by Piaggio during 2004 and Piaggio bosses didn’t deem the Cube worth saving, even though it had a new project leader: Gigi Dall’Igna.
Edwards aboard the Aprilia RS Cube he loved and hated
Aprilia
The Cube failed largely because Aprilia outsourced engine design to renowned Formula 1 engineers Cosworth.
Cosworth was responsible for Aprilia achieving several MotoGP engineering firsts – the Cube was the first 990cc MotoGP bike with pneumatic valve springs, the first with a ride-by-wire throttle and the first with a carbon clutch. Unfortunately, it was also the first with an engine better suited to car racing than motorcycles.
MotoGP has never had a more unpopular technical regulation than its tyre-pressure rule, which robbed Maverick Viñales of a podium finish in last week’s Qatar GP. But that’s just one of many dozens of new rules over the past two decades – so what’s the story?
By
Mat Oxley
The history of bike racing is full of moments when car designers introduced tech that worked with four wheels but failed with two wheels. In this case, the inline-triple was basically three cylinders off a ten-cylinder three-litre F1 engine, with a very light crankshaft. And racing motorcycles need a decent amount of inertia to make the engine more manageable.
“The engine was basically three cylinders from an F1 engine, so it had a very light crankshaft and too little inertia, so as soon as you opened the throttle the rear tyre would spin,” McWilliams recalls. “We were always asking for more inertia, but they said there was no room in the engine.
“It had this really weird torque curve, so the engineers tried to fill in the holes in the curve with clever fuel and torque maps. It started making torque at around 9000rpm, then it dropped away and then there was a really sharp torque peak at 12,500, which sent the bike sideways and fired you on your nose.
“Everybody still talks about how amazing the bike sounded but it didn’t sound so good sat on it! The reverberations went right through you. It was an absolute f***ing beast of a motorcycle!”
