Ducati's rise to dominance in MotoGP has been profound. Many factors are at play, but Ducati has found corner speed and combined that with its dominant power, plus an ability to exploit rear grip to the maximum. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron dives in with Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer on how the relatively small Bologna-based manufacturer has found its winning formula.
Looking to buy? Get prequalified
https://octane.co/flex/1?a=171
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
Looking to buy? Get prequalified
https://octane.co/flex/1?a=171
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00:00Welcome back to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm with Kevin Cameron, our technical editor.
00:00:07Our topic this week, how is Ducati dominating MotoGP?
00:00:14Because they are. And how can this small Italian factory, I mean, they've got Audi behind them and all that, but
00:00:20you know, we, well, I certainly grew up in the era of Japanese dominance.
00:00:26It was basically a Yamaha and a Honda battle. And then Suzuki'd come in with, you know, 18 bucks and a
00:00:34young kid from Texas and mix it up a little bit there. But how is Ducati doing this? You know,
00:00:43we've seen them entering corners and exiting corners. That's been really the strength in recent times,
00:00:47but they seem to have added corner speed, making their bike, you know, kind of for
00:00:54useful for everything. That's challenging. My, my desire in a race bike is that it doesn't get in
00:01:00the way of what I ask it to do. Whether lapping by myself or racing with others. So
00:01:07how have they done this, Kevin?
00:01:12Well,
00:01:13during the several years of complete dominance by Mark Marquez on Honda, he rode in a very distinctive,
00:01:27extreme point and shoot style, breaking very late and very hard, entering the corner with the back tire
00:01:35in the air, um, setting it down as the bike angled over so that the motorcycle entered the corner
00:01:44already turning, already sliding. And for some years, Ducati had seemingly tried to
00:01:58win championships by out Marquez-ing Marquez. Ducati's qualities were extremely powerful off-corner
00:02:10acceleration and powerful breaking on the way in. And using those qualities, um,
00:02:18Dovizioso was able to win, uh, to, to be second in the world championship twice, but, uh, urging
00:02:31from Ducati that he should display more courage didn't seem to be a solution.
00:02:38And of course, this is something that happens all the time. You see the successful style and you think,
00:02:46well, I'll have to learn that. And then you find that you're years behind the people who've been
00:02:51doing it forever. So it was clear to people on the outside that Ducati would have to come up with
00:03:01something in addition to their strengths in order to overcome Honda. And the way things were,
00:03:15riders were divided into two groups, corner speed riders like Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo
00:03:24and point and shoot riders of whom the leading exponent was, uh, Mark Marquez. Now different riding
00:03:36styles in the past used to simply mean, uh, quirky little differences like where's your knee, where,
00:03:43how much do you slide your butt over and so on. But these two riding styles were so
00:03:50essentially different that motorcycles were engineered to support the riding style to the
00:03:59point that, for example, when Cal Crutchlow, um, joined Yamaha in 2011, he described his experience
00:04:11there as saying, well, I'm from Superbike. So naturally I tried to ride the thing that way and
00:04:17it wouldn't do it. I had to learn to ride it its way. So not only were the riders and the motorcycles
00:04:28divided into these two basically opposed camps, but also the racetracks began to be spoken of,
00:04:37oh, that's a Yamaha track. Yamaha always goes well there. Um, that would mean that it didn't have a lot
00:04:43of little, uh, formula one track style wiggles in it where the Hondas do so wonderfully well
00:04:49and, uh, Yamahas do well on long sweeping corners, but
00:04:56it looked for a long time as if, uh, Ducati were, were stuck in sixth, seventh, and eighth place.
00:05:08They had entered MotoGP in its second year, 2003, with, uh, two very good riders, Loris Caporossi and
00:05:18Troy Bayless. And Caporossi had won a race the first year and given Honda kind of a,
00:05:25given them a scare. These guys have horsepower. What are we going to do about it? Because originally
00:05:32in 2001, Yasuo Ikenoya, who had been a president of HRC had said, our motorcycle will be, will
00:05:42represent a super bike level technology. There will be no exotic materials or technologies. And
00:05:50so it, it wasn't clear what was, what the future would bring. At one point, it seemed like
00:06:01after Jorge Lorenzo that a corner speed style was going to die out, but there was, uh, Dovizioso
00:06:13riding the Ducati and calling out every year, please, can we do something about increased corner
00:06:21speed, corner speed ability? Well, why would, why would the Ducati have poor corner speed ability?
00:06:31The reason would be that in the point and shoot style, you break so hard that if the steering
00:06:39head is not marvelously rigid, you can develop braking instability on the way in and be tossed
00:06:47on the ground. And, uh, Max Biagi described that saying that it comes on so quickly, you can't
00:06:55really do anything about it. So Ducati had tried to hire, um, Gigi Delinia away from Aprilia, uh,
00:07:11before. And the chat at the time was that Delinia said, if I come to do this job, I need to have a free
00:07:19hand. And they said, well, what sorts of things would that apply to? And, um, he ended up saying,
00:07:30see, see you guys, um, get well soon. And Ducati situation didn't improve. So they went to Delinia
00:07:42again, and this is, this is rumor unsupported by photography and sound recording. Um, and he did
00:07:52take the job. So presumably he had a free hand. And I think he knew as many people did at trackside
00:08:02that Ducati had certain cherished, uh, deeply cherished, uh, engineering ideas about racing
00:08:11motorcycles that they were not easily going to give up. So when, uh, the late Warren Willing was hired as
00:08:20a, uh, chassis consultant, I spoke to him at, in Annapolis, he was actually wearing the red outfit
00:08:28outfit. And he said, I, I don't think I'm going to be able to do anything for these people because
00:08:35they don't like what I tell them. So that suggested that, uh, Delinia would have to
00:08:44reeducate some people. And I think that ultimately what Delinia persuaded Ducati to do was to give
00:08:58up on what had to that point been the most successful system in MotoGP, which I'm going to call one
00:09:06man, one motorcycle. Honda had Marquez and they developed the motorcycle around him and no one
00:09:16else could ride it and get the results that he was getting. They couldn't come close. So it was
00:09:24his motorcycle at Yamaha. Um, Fabio Cuartararo was a fairly, uh, standard corner speed rider,
00:09:38but they had also hired Maverick Vinales and Vinales was saying, Oh, I ride a more aggressive
00:09:44style. And I'd like to have these point and shoot sort of changes to the motorcycle because
00:09:50a corner speed bike is long and low so that it doesn't, it's not able to instantly transfer
00:09:58weight to the front when you break or to the rear, when you accelerate, because in the corner speed
00:10:03style, because the corner speed is high, you don't have to break as much and you don't have as much
00:10:11speed to recover on the way out. Whereas with point and shoot, you're violently breaking to the turning
00:10:20zone where you flick it in, get it turned quickly at quite a moderate speed and early so that you have
00:10:29the rest of the corner in which to accelerate to a competitive exit speed. Yeah. I've always likened
00:10:37that to the shape of a football versus the shape of a soccer ball. Yeah. And you can really feel it
00:10:44on the track. I, it was something I was very much more a corner speed rider and it took me riding two
00:10:49up with Jason Pridmore at Thunder Hill through a big arcing corner to see he sacrificed just a little
00:10:59speed kind of in the middle of the corner. Yeah. And I was, you know, I'm, I mean, I'm huge, man. I'm
00:11:05like 220 pounds and I'm sitting on Pridmore's back and he's not the smallest guy either.
00:11:10And we were on a Katana, a Suzuki Katana and he pivoted. I felt the bike pivot in the corner at
00:11:16that moment. And I was like, not being a world-class talented MotoGP rider, I didn't just learn that
00:11:23on my own, but I got to sit there and feel it. And it's, it's a, it's a big difference. Yeah.
00:11:28Yeah. So, uh, those one man, one motorcycle deals were highly successful on their own, but
00:11:42for Honda, um, Mark Marquez was injured. He broke his upper arm bone and then he had a long sabbatical
00:11:54of recovery and re-operation. And it was, I think it must've been terrible for him because racers want
00:12:02to race. They don't want to lie in a bed and be told, hold perfectly still, or you'll never play football
00:12:08again. Uh, and on the other hand, Corderaro teamed with Vinales. Vinales is wanting to pull the
00:12:19motorcycle this way. And Corderaro is holding on. No, that's my motorcycle. I want it to suit me.
00:12:27And it was clear from the way that big companies behaved at the time that
00:12:34upper management had no idea that there were two riding styles.
00:12:39So I think that Delinia was able to turn one man, one rider sort of on its head and say,
00:12:52we'll have one design of motorcycle and many riders. And they'll be young, hot graduates fresh from Moto2,
00:13:02meaning that they will not have formed as many bad habits. Irv Kanemoto used to say,
00:13:10I wish there were a way to get at young riders before they've, they've gone down the dead ends
00:13:18that so many of them do, King of the Late Breakers and so forth. So, uh, I think that Delinia's plan was
00:13:28if we put these talented people on a strong motorcycle, they will learn to ride it. They
00:13:36will discover its strengths and weaknesses, which we can then, uh, deal with. And he instituted the
00:13:46plan of complete data sharing. It didn't matter whether you were the top man or the bottom man,
00:13:53you had access to everyone's data. And the motorcycles weren't that different.
00:14:01They might be a year apart in manufacture time, but instead of sending last year's bikes to the
00:14:08crusher, why not send them to the grid with another chance at discovering a great rider?
00:14:15And they did. And as we saw, uh, Francesco Begnaia won two world championships and, uh, Jorge MartÃn
00:14:29won last year's world championship on Ducati. And during those several years, Ducati riders were saying,
00:14:40I'm noticing that this motorcycle has more corner speed capability. Now, what I think happened is that
00:14:50Ducati was quietly doing what, uh, Dovizioso wanted, which was to find a fusion motorcycle design that had
00:15:01basic point and shoot, uh, uh, capability, but with corner speed capability added to it.
00:15:12And this is why, uh, when, uh, Marquez finally did come back and was presumably given a motorcycle,
00:15:22something like the ones that he'd ridden previously, didn't get on with it. And it was worse than that
00:15:29too, because at Yamaha, the engineers were trying to please, um, Vinales, who wanted to ride more
00:15:40aggressively, that is more pointed shoot, shootishly, uh, while not too deeply offending Corderaro.
00:15:49They ended up with nothing. And, uh, uh, then of course, uh, Marquez had his accident. He was off the air.
00:16:04The two companies decided, well, we're going to have to alter our motorcycles so that more riders can
00:16:12go well on them. And they neglected what the Europeans were doing, which was creating this
00:16:19fusion of the two styles. So the Japanese companies, Honda and Yamaha were off doing their own thing.
00:16:29And when they, uh, finally brought their stuff back into the, uh, fray,
00:16:37MotoGP had become a European series. It had been a Japanese series for years with Ducati having the
00:16:47one championship in 2007 with Casey Stoner, but it had become a European series and the series,
00:16:57mainly Ducati had introduced very quickly, wonderful new technologies, downforce aero.
00:17:10Here's a good reason to have downforce on your motorcycle, not to press the tires harder against
00:17:16the track as in formula one, but to keep the front end from rising up and tripping the anti-spin
00:17:24system during acceleration. How does the anti-spin system work? By closing the throttle somewhat.
00:17:33In other words, slowing down your acceleration. But if you have cleverly used the air flowing over
00:17:40your motorcycle with little winglets and, or chin wings as Aprilia have, uh, developed that downforce
00:17:49stops the front end from lifting and triggering the anti-spin system. So you can accelerate harder
00:17:56all the way to the end of the, uh, straightaway without having this system being interfering.
00:18:04No, you have to get the throttle, turn that back, feel the, feel the grip of the, of the machine
00:18:12on your throttle hand. So. Well, they have it working at lean angle as well, right? We've got,
00:18:18Oh yeah. We've got little. There are pads on the sides of some of these motorcycles that are very
00:18:23close to the ground at full lean. Well, the ones by the rear wheel. Yes. And there, there are also
00:18:31little things that look like they might be there to, to guide air onto the brake calipers, but they are
00:18:39actually lying nearly parallel to the track at full lean. So they're trying to get downforce in the
00:18:49corner to make the tires grip. Now, how would Ducati get their rear tire to grip when everyone else is
00:18:59saying, well, you know, we, we, we, we really like to have more, more grip because going in, it's a little
00:19:06loose. And then when we go to accelerate, it's not that strong. And Cordero has been up to his
00:19:12armpits in weak rear traction for, for four or five years. So one, uh, clue to all of this came recently
00:19:29from, uh, British, uh, writer, uh, Matt Oxley, who showed that there are new methods of tire
00:19:42temperature prediction that can be effective. And basically what you have is a means of measuring
00:19:53the tire's external surface temperature and a scanning device inside the tire attached to the rim
00:20:00that scans across the inside of the, of the carcass. And with the aid of knowing the variation
00:20:13in temperature as the motorcycle rolls around the circuit and having some ability to vary tire temperature
00:20:22you can locate the constantly varying tire temperature that your motorcycle displays as
00:20:31it goes through corners, down straightaways, et cetera, to locate that within the 10 degrees
00:20:38centigrade, 17, 17 degrees Fahrenheit band where tire grip is maximum.
00:20:46Now with street bikes, we don't notice a maximum and there's a reason for that. Rubber is a very odd
00:20:59material. When it gets colder, eventually it reaches what's called the glass transition temperature or T
00:21:08sub G. It turns into a solid that is hard and inelastic.
00:21:16And as it heats up, it becomes more and more mobile until it becomes, uh, snappy like a rubber band.
00:21:25And it turns out that optimum grip comes when the rubber is still slightly stiff.
00:21:34It's not hard enough to just glide along the pavement surface without gripping.
00:21:39It's soft enough to take an imprint from the pavement texture, but sliding causes energy loss in the tread
00:21:51surface. That translates to grip. And so this, this narrow band of 10 degrees centigrade in temperature
00:22:01is where you want your tires to be. Now, if you follow MotoGP at all, you've seen the predicament of riders who aren't
00:22:13quick enough to lead and are obliged to draft others. Their front tires become hotter and hotter because
00:22:23the energy of 100 toasters, 100 kitchen toasters is streaming from the radiator as hot air, mixing with a similar
00:22:36amount of heat from the leading motorcycles exhaust. So your front tire temperature goes up, its pressure goes up,
00:22:44its footprint gets smaller, and you start experiencing locking, breaking for corners. You've experienced little slips.
00:22:55Your front tire tread temperature has overshot the peak and is now dropping on the far side. On the other hand,
00:23:08uh, Mark has recently had the opposite situation in which he was leading the race from his brother
00:23:15and he saw that his front tire was cooling off. What did he do? He has presence of mind.
00:23:25He quickly let his brother into the lead and tucked in behind him to give his front tire a toasting.
00:23:33And he stayed there until a few laps from the end. And this has been his way for so many years. Oh, his,
00:23:41that rear tire of the man ahead of me looks like it's a done to a turn. I'll just pass this fellow
00:23:48and there'll be nothing he can do about it because his tire is toast. So,
00:23:55this, this tire temperature thing is a very serious matter. I don't have any information
00:24:02that tells me why rear tires, uh, lack for grip, but the two basic things are the tire temperature
00:24:11and the amount of load on the tire. They have tried to increase load on the rear tire because you
00:24:20probably heard them talking about, Oh, well, we, we want to get more braking force out of the rear
00:24:26brake. So we're moving weight toward the rear. And you just wonder if, because that's, that's where
00:24:34we started in the 1950s with the engine way back against the rear tire. And it famously didn't
00:24:41work very well. Well, there's a lot going on. I mean, the whole package of everything that's going
00:24:46on in a MotoGP bike, uh, is mind boggling. And it's, it's so systemic and it's very active now
00:24:55because we're, we're watching ride heights change. They're starting when they're squatting,
00:24:59squatted, but also you're getting ride height change, all the things that are being managed
00:25:05and modeled. Ducati has been using cameras, high speed cameras, examining where and how riders move
00:25:13on the bike. Uh, Lenovo, they have a robot going around the racetracks and modeling the racetracks to
00:25:19the, you know, to the pebble. And then there, and then you, you know, I mean, Ducati itself is
00:25:27advanced. I mean, they've got a lot of, uh, people focused on racing. We've talked about
00:25:32the, uh, so-called combustion department, you know, as people working on how combustion works and,
00:25:38um, you know, they see, and now they're scanning the tire temperature from inside. Cause that was
00:25:46tire temperature was always a thing where you just, you know, um, those uninformed among us
00:25:53back when we first got, uh, infrared thermometers. Yeah. Well, like, yeah, no,
00:25:58I can measure my tire temperature. And like, no, you can't. Cause all you're getting is the surface
00:26:03you're not getting. And then you watch the Dunlop guy come over at the time. It was Jim Allen
00:26:07and he sticks a probe into the tire. Uh, this is right down to the junction between the tread
00:26:13and the carcass. And so now we're, so now we're scanning the inside of the tire
00:26:19for tire temperature. You've talked about having microphones to listen to the sound because got,
00:26:25you had interviewed many riders who said, no, the tire sounds different when the, the grip is
00:26:32changing. You know, when the temperature of the tire is going off, it sounds different. And I,
00:26:35you, oh, he's, Kevin's always told me the story where he goes up to the tire guy and he says,
00:26:40hey, you ought to put some microphones on here and just, and they're like, ah, funny old Kev,
00:26:45you know, but, uh, Ducati, if you're listening and you haven't put mics on your tires, it might be
00:26:50worthwhile. Um, so, uh, the other one big innovation from Ducati was the use of aero and, uh,
00:27:02uh, the other bun, the other one is variable ride height. Now in motocross there, they,
00:27:09they knew that motocross bikes, which in order to have long travel have to be extremely tall.
00:27:17The taller you make the motorcycle, the more easy it is for it to wheelie,
00:27:21which means you lose out on the drag race to turn one on a tall bike. So why don't we
00:27:28break really hard as we come up to the starting, uh, wire and have a hook that goes click and holds
00:27:39the front end of the bike down so that during the drag race, we'll have a dragster shaped motorcycle
00:27:47that is less tall, at least in the front. And we win the drag race to turn one. And the first
00:27:54opportunity to break really hard click the, uh, down lock will release and the suspension will
00:28:02move normally. Yeah. Big wing nut hole shot device. Yeah. So, um, naturally, uh, people have been
00:28:12thinking about variable ride height for years and years in 1972. I thought, what would, what would
00:28:19happen if you could lower your motorcycle three inches? That was a lot of travel in 1972.
00:28:24What if we could lower the motorcycle three inches just for acceleration and braking and let it rise
00:28:31up to go through corners? Well, eventually somebody did something about it and it was Ducati in this
00:28:40case. Um, let's extend the system to their wheel. Oh, well, it says here in the rule book, you cannot use
00:28:48an electrical or hydraulic system, uh, powered by the engine to, uh, do anything on the motorcycle,
00:28:57for example, open the throttles really quickly. So then they looked around at existing technologies
00:29:06and they may have seen, uh, the device, uh, the suspension that some BMWs were equipped with
00:29:13that has variable ride height built into it. And it uses suspension movement to pump fluid
00:29:24to accumulate a source of energy that can be used to pull the suspension down or to let it spring back
00:29:32up. So then the rules interpreter said, well, um, we really want the rider to control this.
00:29:42And the team, uh, uh, the team bosses said, Oh, you, you want to add to our riders workload?
00:29:51Hmm. I think they already have plenty to do. Hmm. Well then, uh, we think they, they should have to
00:30:01trigger it when they approach the corner, they'll press a button and then it would be all right to
00:30:06have a pre-programmed sequence of events take place. Hmm. Well, if you look at, at, uh,
00:30:14video from MotoGP or even at stills, you will see motorcycles whose belly pans are
00:30:21almost touching the ground out on the circuit, not from the start to turn one, but during races
00:30:30on corner after corner. So, and if you think about this, you can, you can come up with some,
00:30:39some really wonderful ways to schedule the rise and fall of the motorcycle in order to achieve
00:30:46certain unspecified effects. So these people are out there. They have these systems. Everybody's
00:30:53got them now. They will be banned in from 2027 for that precise reason, that if everybody has the
00:31:01system, the system no longer provides anyone with an advantage. So we don't need it.
00:31:07So what happens when what happens when lap times get slower? Are we, are we impressed still? That's
00:31:15what that to me is always, well, that's always the problem. It's sort of, it's, it's the problem with,
00:31:20I mean, they want to slow the bikes down, you know, MotoGP doesn't want them to do 255 miles an
00:31:26hour at Mugello or something. Right. So, um, but as an audience, you know, we're always looking for
00:31:33progression. So, well, uh, I think that was taken care of at Daytona by shortening turn to what used
00:31:41to be called turn to, Oh, well, we need more parking for premium motorhome, uh, people. And so
00:31:49we'll just move the turn down and the lap times just keep getting faster and faster, even though
00:31:54they're racing six hundreds now instead of super bikes and Daytona. So it will be interesting because
00:32:02without the ability for the motorcycle to squat down during acceleration and braking, uh, the speeds
00:32:10breached will be less and they won't be breached as soon. And that's just what happens when the
00:32:21regulatory people say, well, we'd like to try this rule. And I think MotoGP is fortunate because in that
00:32:29they have not suffered the repeated snowfalls of rules that are present in formula one, how large
00:32:39can this hole be? What if the driver pokes his finger in the hole? What if, what if everything,
00:32:45what if everything, and in order to prevent unfair advantages, it seems that they've got to have,
00:32:55uh, all these rules. I kind of want to make a t-shirt out of that. What is everything?
00:33:01I think it's, it's a good shirt. Kevin Cameron, what if everything?
00:33:07Well, that's what, that's what Delinia, Delinia's leadership at Ducati, uh, is exploring, namely everything.
00:33:15And, um, um, I think it would be fabulous to be a fly on the wall and speak Italian. Do you know of
00:33:23any Italian speaking flies? Uh, I'm not, I'm, I'm interested in the chassis at this point because
00:33:30Ducati, Ducati said, we could talk about modeling the tracks and, and variable ride height and doing
00:33:37everything else that they would do to improve a lap time. But we had trellis frame back in the day,
00:33:44which you said when they changed from trellis to the pyramid structure, the black pyramid,
00:33:50the carbon fiber pyramid, which they put then on the super bike in a different form, it wasn't
00:33:56carbon fiber, but, uh, don't think that was necessarily the way to go. They went from two,
00:34:02perhaps too, uh, flexible to not flexible enough. Yeah. Tires outgrew the trellis and then,
00:34:12because what, what Stoner said to me when I asked him about this, because I had seen the trellis bike
00:34:20weaving through corners. And I asked him, how do you deal with that? And he said on that thing,
00:34:28pointing to it, I can't hit the same point in the corner, two laps running because the motorcycle is,
00:34:38is doing its, uh, this is coming from notoriously one of the most precise riders we've ever seen
00:34:45repeatable to exact same point in the corner, RPM, everything over and over again, if he's got the
00:34:52right bike to do it. So when, uh, the bike needed to be a bit stiffer, I think that, uh, Filippo
00:35:01Preziosi, the, um, who was at that time, the chief engineer of Ducati Corsa, uh, said, you want stiff?
00:35:11We'll give you stiff. And they designed this, uh, sheet carbon pyramid, very much like the welded
00:35:21steel, uh, forward frame of a post-war Vincent twin that joins the two cylinder heads and is holding
00:35:29the steering head at its front end. There's no other, there's no other chassis. There's nothing under
00:35:36the engine that's just this structure. So I went to talk to a stoner again when he was riding the
00:35:46black pyramid. And he said on that thing, as though he were pointing to the, the accused in the, in the
00:35:56box on that thing, he said, you're, you later find that the computer data shows everything identical to
00:36:07the lap previous, but for no discoverable reason, you're sliding in the gravel and you have no idea
00:36:14how you got there. Well, this is the classic description of a motorcycle that does not have feel.
00:36:23I made a point of going to ask, uh, Colin Edwards jr. About this because Colin is one of the
00:36:33straightest talkers and he will just tell you what it is. He said, feel is the degree of warning that the
00:36:46motorcycle gives you as you approach the limit of grip. He said, it may be little slips. It may be
00:36:55chatter, but something happens before you've actually lose, uh, the front end and fall into the gravel.
00:37:05It tells you, you're, you're getting pretty close. You might want to reconsider here. And
00:37:11he, uh, that made sense to me. And the way Rogers used the term feel confirms that, that
00:37:24it has always been true that a motorcycle that has a little bit of flexibility in the location of the
00:37:31front tire. The front tire from side to side can function when the motorcycle is leaned way over
00:37:38and the suspension is pointed, not in the direction of the bumps, but in some other direction.
00:37:46If there is lateral flexibility in the location of the front tire, that allows the front tire
00:37:51to follow a limited amount of height variation in the pavement so that instead of skipping from crest to
00:38:03crest, like a rear suspension with no suspension does, it, uh, has a degree of mechanical grip. It can
00:38:14follow the surface and remain in contact with it and continue to steer the motorcycle.
00:38:22But if the front is quite stiff, you don't get that feel, you don't get that information from the
00:38:30motorcycle. And so what must you do? You guess. I guess that I can go into this turn about this, this speed.
00:38:40And as Stoner noted, between one lap and the next, no difference in the data, but on one lap you're
00:38:51falling. That's not a good situation. It was clear that the motorcycle needed help. It needed to regain
00:38:59feel. But sadly, Ducati had been given this wonderful flexibility in the trellis chassis by Massimo
00:39:11Tamburini years before. And he didn't go around and get everyone on the team by the lapels and said,
00:39:20do you realize how this kind of chassis works? So when, uh, Preziosi designed the next step, he thought, well, if we
00:39:31need stiffness, then I know how to do it. We'll use a very stiff material and we'll use it in a very
00:39:38stiff way. So wasn't it, wasn't it Yamaha that showed up with the super stiff frame, you know,
00:39:4720 years earlier and had the same results. We have chatter, we have skate, we have hop.
00:39:52Oh yeah, absolutely. That was, uh, 93, I think. Um, Wayne Rainey at the post-practice, uh, press
00:40:02conference at Eastern Creek. He said, we have chatter, we have hop, and we have skating, and we don't know
00:40:12what to do about it. And before that, um, in the late eighties, the RC 30, look at,
00:40:22if you can see a view somewhere of an RC 30 chassis, tremendous side beams come up and they are,
00:40:29they flow into the steering head in this very aircraft engineering looking way to produce
00:40:36something so rigid that that's a motorcycle that didn't have a lot of feel, but because it could
00:40:44accelerate, it had, it won two super bike world championships.
00:40:51So, uh,
00:40:55then in the next year, um, after his glorious world championship, just a magnificent performance
00:41:04from a man who a year before looked like a, a strange little dumpling chewing his fingernails
00:41:11down to the quick and looking at the monitor. And as though he were waiting for the end of the world,
00:41:17when he was put on a motorcycle that could do what he wanted to do, he won 10 races and the championship.
00:41:25It was like springtime. When the sun shone in the form of that motorcycle,
00:41:33he burst into bloom.
00:41:37So, uh,
00:41:41the first year after that victory, after the world championship that Stoner won,
00:41:46he was fourth in the championship and, uh, no, he was second. And then the two subsequent years,
00:41:54he was second and people were saying, oh, well, he has chronic fatigue syndrome or he may have
00:42:00lactose intolerance and he's not very well. And oh dear. So in 2011, he went to Honda. He won 10 races
00:42:09and a championship, just as he'd done for Ducati. Meanwhile, Honda, who had been
00:42:18out in the wilderness since 2004,
00:42:24had slowly come to appreciate the value of some chassis flexibility.
00:42:29And about mid season 2010, I could see that Danny Pedrosa was almost looking graceful rather than
00:42:43looking like a person taken by surprise by one of those electric bar bulls.
00:42:50So in 2011, the motorcycle Honda was able to give Casey Stoner was one on which he could win 10 races
00:43:01and the championship. So that was pretty wonderful. But this launched, uh, Ducati into nowhere
00:43:11because they didn't know how to fix what they'd done. They, uh, they built, well, first of all,
00:43:20Rossi chooses this moment. I'm going to go to Ducati and I'm going to ride.
00:43:27I'm going to be an Italian rider on an Italian machine.
00:43:31And he went there and I think he was seventh in the championship his first year and sixth
00:43:39the second year as Preziosi tried one thing after another. And they moving back toward
00:43:48the standard conformist approach, which was a twin aluminum beam chassis with a degree,
00:43:55if this is the steering head, a degree of side to side flexibility
00:44:01to give the rider the feel necessary to ride close to, but not over the edge.
00:44:08And that's what I understand has happened with their current Ducati is that they've introduced
00:44:15a lateral flexibility that's improved the grip.
00:44:18Well, look at, look at that wonderful photograph.
00:44:22Yeah.
00:44:23I mean, the first thing I remember being in the, in Yamaha's museum in Hamamatsu,
00:44:31they call it the media center, I think. And a Yamaha engineer and I were having a conversation
00:44:40and he said to me, I believe that Honda have made an important step forward. He said,
00:44:47if you look at their chassis, you will see that instead of the front of the two beams attaching to
00:44:54the cylinder head, that there are two little hangers, like inch by inch,
00:45:04going down and attaching to the engine at the top of the crankcase.
00:45:11And this, he said, I believe allows the steering head some lateral movement.
00:45:18Well, meanwhile, at Ducati, they realize that the thing is too stiff,
00:45:22so they're trying all this stuff. They try, uh, moving the front wheel bearings closer together.
00:45:31Ball bearings are quite flexible and moving the bearings closer together. It gives the side
00:45:38force on the tire a lot more leverage so that it can move at the bottom. They went to smaller fork tubes
00:45:44and they weren't getting any night and day result. It was sort of like looking for the cup with your, uh,
00:45:57golf ball and club in a dark warehouse with a perfectly level floor. It could be anywhere
00:46:04and you can't see it. How are you going to find it? You don't.
00:46:09So, wonderful, uh, Max Oxley's photograph of the Ducati with the faring off shows not inch by inch
00:46:23pieces extending down to attach to the engine at a lower point than the cylinder head, but pieces of
00:46:30triangular pieces of thin sheet metal possessing essentially zero lateral resistance.
00:46:40So then you think, oh, but what about braking stability? If the steering head is so flexible,
00:46:46aren't you, aren't you going to run the risk of having braking instability throw you on the ground?
00:46:52Well, I learned something when I was invited
00:47:00into Richard Stamboli's pit, uh, at Indianapolis the year that he was running his CRT bike. CRT is a
00:47:09forgotten concept among many that, uh, Dorna tried. It stands for, uh, claiming rules teams.
00:47:18And the idea was that a team would be allowed to build a motorcycle out of old super bike engines and
00:47:28cast off moto two chassis at low cost, uh, with, um, Mr. Espeleta helping them with
00:47:39sorry, but I got a, I got a low car, low cost, not, not cheap, but lower, lower cost, maybe it's
00:47:49compared with F 22. Yes. Yes. So, um, well, airliners are, uh, between 900 and a thousand dollars a
00:47:59pound now, just as a rule of thumb. Um, so it could be worse. So they
00:48:14have this lateral flexibility. How are they going to brake hard in the traditional fashion? And
00:48:21Richard Stamboli, his bike showed me how it could, one way that it could possibly be done.
00:48:30He made the machine from solid side beam elements.
00:48:35Attack racing. Richard, Richard Stamboli does attack racing and he's a very hands-on
00:48:40engineer. He likes to make, make things and he's very, he makes you feel like giving up on being a
00:48:46human being because you've accomplished so little in your lifetime. Just let me out of here. Um,
00:48:54and designs spring full blown from his forehead, like Hera from the forehead of Zeus. So I see that
00:49:02these members go quite close to the cylinder head on their way to the steering head. And I see this
00:49:07little gap in there. And I said to him, did you ever think about putting something in there
00:49:13and crushable to see how much the chassis is moving from side to side? Um, I've got a lot of things to
00:49:20do. Okay. Yeah. Good. But then I thought, well, what if you had little extensions of the cylinder head
00:49:35that actually touched the inside of the frame and they were like a through rod style steering damper
00:49:47so that when there is no orifice control and the steering head moves from side to side, it does so
00:49:54freely. But what if you then close off the orifice? Now the engine cylinder head is in contact with the
00:50:04frame members and they can't move. Now there's a lot of ways you could do this.
00:50:12And I'm not claiming to know which of them might be actually effective, but there's one, just an
00:50:19example. So you're talking about the, the frame laterally being free to flex, but if you were braking
00:50:27hard, the frame is going to deflect and then come into contact with a stiff structure closer to the
00:50:33steering head. That is the freedom to move from side to side would be locked out just as if you
00:50:39closed the orifice in a through rod steering damper, you wouldn't be able to steer. Right.
00:50:44We're just, yeah. And that's, uh, that's compelling. I mean, that's, I don't know how many people or if
00:50:51anyone is doing that, but it sounds good. Well, it's just, I was, you know, racking my brains.
00:50:56How would you make a bike that can break hard without breaking instability and yet, which can,
00:51:03uh, provides a level of mechanical grip when leaned way over in a corner. So, um, again,
00:51:12this pure speculation on, on my part, and it might be one of those things that the, the rules makers
00:51:19would look at and say, oh, we are awarding you, uh, with yet another, uh, career award by banning your idea.
00:51:32Because, uh, that used to look like that was the way Robin to Louie, um, was rewarded by formula one,
00:51:41that his ideas were banned. That meant they actually worked.
00:51:47So, and by the way, Robin to Louie is frequently mentioned in connection with, uh, Ducati's
00:51:55recent, uh, rise to dominance in MotoGP.
00:51:59I think it's, we should do the Robin to Louie sidebar here because his mass dampers are what has
00:52:05kind of built a whole career for him. I guess certainly there'd be other elements to it, but
00:52:11well, uh, tall buildings, uh, in wind shed vortices, the same as when you ride behind
00:52:21a box truck on your motorcycle and you feel this biff pow, biff pow from side to side as air swirls
00:52:29around the back forms a vortex and it comes loose and hits you. And then it forms a vortex going the
00:52:35other way. And under certain circumstances, the building can sway
00:52:43in a motion that builds up from aerodynamic forces.
00:52:48So what they did was they measured the natural frequency of the bending frequency of the building,
00:52:56which is pretty easy to do. You just put an accelerometer on the table and hook it up to
00:53:03your pocket tectronics. Uh, and then you need to design a damper that is tuned to damp only a single
00:53:12frequency, namely the one, the building sway frequency. And that is basically a mass constrained
00:53:20between springs. If you move the mass off center and let go of it, it goes
00:53:30get the springs right and the mass right, and you can tune it to any frequency you like.
00:53:35That mass will not develop much motion unless the driving force, in this case, the building sway frequency,
00:53:46is in step with the tuned mass dampers frequency. So, uh, Formula One cars had all kinds of troublesome
00:53:56nonsense going on. And along comes Robin to Louie, who was originally in Arrow and Astro at Penn, I think.
00:54:07And he said, I saw that when the downturn came that I wasn't going to get tenure. So I'd better get a job.
00:54:16And he got a job at Polaris where he did, um, vehicle dynamics. And when he left there, he went to, uh,
00:54:25Minneapolis testing service, MTS, who were a frequent destination for Formula One teams who wanted to run
00:54:33on a seven post shaker in order to learn things about how their chassis and suspension would work.
00:54:41And they noticed that this, uh, to Louie fellow was, was pretty bright. And he didn't memorize any,
00:54:52any constants or any, uh, stuff. He just derived the expression as needed, because that's how it made
00:55:02sense to him. People like this, men and women,
00:55:06seem to have a second site that operates through numbers. And it's just a wonderful thing.
00:55:17Um, which I dearly wish I could have been gifted with, but I wasn't, but these people, uh, look at
00:55:26these numerical problems and they say, oh, well, we'll have to have, uh, one of a term like this and
00:55:32a term like this. And then I watched it done one day on a blackboard. This professor wrote out this
00:55:4120 foot long expression. And then he stood back and he said, oh, well, for very small V and he crossed
00:55:50off several expressions. And then for, uh, vanishingly small alpha, he crossed, he ended up with this,
00:55:59with this tight, compelling expression, which was an approximation, good enough to work.
00:56:09And he said, yeah, he said, I remember this now. It was, uh, something to do with fiberglass
00:56:15supercharger impellers. I was doing that in 1948. Oh, thank you.
00:56:21It's just, but we got to have these people because they can look at things that are mystic mystifying
00:56:30the rest of us and see sense. So mass damp mass dampers, we'd be looking at eliminating chatter.
00:56:40Yeah. And we're anyone who has looked at the videos of Jack Miller's KTM last season.
00:56:52It looks like the tire tread band is nutating. It is. It's like a coin that is in the last throws
00:57:02of settling flat onto the table. It's doing that. And the back of the motorcycle is being yanked from
00:57:09side to side as this is happening. And it, it just looks like the wheels going to come off.
00:57:16The whole thing's going to explode. Poor Jack. We'll visit him in hospital and bring him flowers.
00:57:23Um, he survived it handily, but he definitely wanted something done about it.
00:57:31So people believe that what appears to be a bento box or other small container
00:57:39on the back of the Ducati in place of a swoopy, uh, seat back contains a tuned mass damper.
00:57:50And that, uh, it is tuned to whatever that horrible frequency is, whether the, the rear tire
00:57:59tread band is moving from side to side as a whole, or whether it's doing this nutating movement.
00:58:07There, these are vibrational modes.
00:58:12And
00:58:16supposedly, uh, this past year when
00:58:20Michelin came with a
00:58:23big new rear slick,
00:58:24uh, Ducati had some trouble with it at first, but they were able to insert screwdriver and adjusting
00:58:33hole a turn to the right for improved results.
00:58:38And then the rider said, fine, that's good. I leave it right there.
00:58:42Well, they used the grip. The tire came in and it had more grip and they were able to figure out how to
00:58:46use it both for, uh, braking and exiting the corner without pushing. And that was partly with the, uh,
00:58:55lateral flexibility. And then as you say, you know, something to do with a mass damper somewhere.
00:59:00Well, there, there's a precedent.
00:59:03There's a precedent here in 2006, uh, Honda lobbied for Michelin. Uh, there was tire competition at that
00:59:12time. So Michelin was not a spec supplier, but, uh, Michelin came with this great big wide new slick
00:59:20that Honda wanted. And Jeremy Burgess said at Yamaha, we didn't need this because we were corner
00:59:28speed guys and we needed a tire whose carcass was stiff enough, uh, not to jump sideways if it,
00:59:37if it slipped a little bit. And so we weren't interested in this tire,
00:59:42but Honda wanted it for their point and shoot riders who wanted a big low pressure tire that
00:59:49spread out a giant footprint for off corner acceleration. Honda had some trouble, uh, with
00:59:58that tire in their first encounter and they overcame it. Yamaha got into deep trouble with
01:00:08that tire because of chatter. And that was the year that, uh, Nikki Hayden looked around. Uh,
01:00:17Rossi's busy with that tire of his and the other hot guys on the Ducatis are in the hospital.
01:00:26I guess it's up to me. And he won the world championship, Mr. Hard work himself. And
01:00:37that big tire, uh, was a sort of a portent of what happened in 2024 because yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
01:00:47Just, um, if, if you're doing a point and shoot, you need all the grip you can for acceleration,
01:00:57which means you need a large footprint. And the only way you're going to get it is with
01:01:02a more flexible carcass and possibly with lower inflation pressure. So, uh,
01:01:09uh, these are things we can't know about because we aren't Italian speaking flies, but, uh,
01:01:19you're talking about the competition period is when, um, the miraculous, uh, so the tire competition
01:01:27period where manufacturers were fighting each other, uh, with technology at every race and Michelin
01:01:33was making tires based on the weather for the race day and everything that had happened in
01:01:40qualifying and testing up to that point and making them overnight, new tires with a recipe to win
01:01:48that were showing up at the track and being put on race bikes. I mean, just awesome.
01:01:54Well, you do what, what you can. Somebody said, uh, you know, with this, with this new manufacturing
01:02:01system, we can make these tires overnight. Huh? You mentioned also, uh, Nicky Hayden, you know,
01:02:09winning the championship and using, uh, using his big tire to do that. I was wandering in the paddock
01:02:16at Laguna Seca, uh, during AMA racing and Nicky was up and coming still. Yeah. And he was sent out
01:02:27and qualifying for the first time ever. And I happened to be there when he came in,
01:02:31he was sent out and qualifying for the first time ever with a qualifying tire, a Dunlop qualifier.
01:02:37And he'd never tried one before. And, uh, I saw him come back in and he's walking across the paddock
01:02:44and he said a pretty good time, but he didn't set pole. I don't think he's walking across the paddock.
01:02:49And then there's Jim Allen walking. So Jim Allen was in charge of Dunlop racing tires in America,
01:02:55like that whole operation. He was at every race for a very long time. And Jim's walking across the
01:03:01paddock and he's looking at Nicky Hayden space. And I'm standing there watching this and Nicky's face
01:03:06is just, he's just like wide eyed looking at Jim. And he's like, Jim says, let me guess by the time
01:03:13you figured out how good it was, it was gone. He's like, yeah. Cause they had these qualifying
01:03:19tires that were just insane, but you had to use them in like two laps. You had an out lap and then
01:03:23you did a time and then that was it thing was smoked. And, um, but you know, Maladon was like
01:03:29insane on those things. Like he would go out and just set these mind bending times and qualifying with
01:03:35that tire. And, uh, it was just a neat moment to see Nicky Hayden, you know, learn something yet
01:03:40again. Cause I, I saw him race it at, um, Willow Springs when he was 16 ish. And during the course
01:03:49of a club, it was before the national, he was out at a club race and I watched him learn turn seven,
01:03:56eight and nine at Willow, which are quite fast. And there's your, you feel very far afield out there
01:04:02because there isn't a lot to reference. You're just, you just started to have to figure it out.
01:04:07And during the race, he got a good start and he'd go through the clover leaf over the top. And then,
01:04:12you know, they exit five and six and then guys would just go passing him.
01:04:19And then he'd do it again. He'd pass them back into one, two, three, four, et cetera. And this happened
01:04:25for, you know, five of the seven laps or five or whatever it is, five of the eight laps. And then
01:04:30he figured it out. And then to win the race, he passed guys like it looked like on the outside
01:04:36in seven, eight and nine, finishing that race to win. It just took, he, he just learned it. He
01:04:41figured it out. He saw these other guys and saw what was going on. And this is an important thing
01:04:46to understand about racing. And a lot of people don't understand it. Their idea of racing is that
01:04:53the more daring you are, the faster you go. And that it's basically an extension of slow down and
01:05:02live, speed up and die. That it's an approach conflict with fear. It is not, it is a skill
01:05:10that must be learned. When he had that difficulty in those turns and people were passing him,
01:05:18he was thinking about it. How can they do that? How can I do that? Ah, after a while, ah,
01:05:27insight. And then when he did it that way and may have added something of his own,
01:05:35he became unbeatable there because he knew how to do it. It wasn't that he was brave or foolish
01:05:45or had a bigger stomach for risk than somebody else. It was that he analyzed what he would have to do
01:05:55to get through those turns like those other people were doing.
01:05:59Yeah. All the top racers, incredible memories and so much intelligence and analytical power.
01:06:09Yeah. And for the Haydens, they're all super smart. You know, they're, they were all super smart. They
01:06:14all had quite a bit at six, quite a bit at six of success. Um, and I think for Nikki on the world
01:06:21stage, it was pretty cool because, you know, with the Kentucky accent and being all down home,
01:06:28you know, Europeans are like looking down their nose at who's this, you know, who's this and just
01:06:35it's just beautiful how, how successful they were. And Nikki in particular, watching all that was
01:06:43just a miracle. And it was fun to, you know, it's fun to be there.
01:06:46Now, all these, these methods, these, for example, uh, tire surface temperature optimization,
01:06:56uh, people who had been in formula one, you can imagine that they, they say to themselves,
01:07:04I've busted my last tire. I'm going to open a consultancy and suddenly stuff that had been arcane
01:07:13team secrets. Um, the method of analysis becomes over the counter flash the card,
01:07:21no, the deepest inner secrets. And this is the way racing goes. You, you come up with something
01:07:30new like variable ride height or the arrow or whatever it is. And it takes the others a while
01:07:37to catch up. Well, the business that Ducati are in right now is coming up with more technology.
01:07:46So that by the time your opposition have figured out what you were doing in all these other cases,
01:07:53you're, you've moved on. You have a new area of superiority that nobody has analyzed. Uh,
01:08:01and I think this, this tire temperature optimization looks like, uh, good fun. In the video that I saw,
01:08:09it shows this, this sort of orangey band, which is the 10 degrees centigrade of ideal tire surface
01:08:18temperature. And the superimposed on it is the trace lap after lap of the actual temperature on the tire.
01:08:27And, uh, the purpose of gathering all this data is so that you can make a, uh, validatable,
01:08:36uh, predictive model so that you can say, if we do these things, we will get this result.
01:08:47I think it's really powerful what you're saying in that moment. There's a couple of things there is,
01:08:54we can gather in incomprehensible amount of data now with all the systems that are on the bike,
01:09:04every sensor and they've, they've, they've got sensors and data coming in from everything,
01:09:10temperatures around the engine and tire inside the tires. And what's this, are we measuring the side
01:09:16flex? And you're taking all of that with probably some artificial intelligence, machine learning,
01:09:23and you're taking all of that data and turning it into something that you can interpret and predict
01:09:31with. So there's a massive amount that is being processed in a way that can be comprehensible.
01:09:39And I think based on what's happening with Ducati, it's obvious that they're doing a very, very good job
01:09:45of that. Yeah. Cause that has to be where all the magic is coming. Gone are the days of listening,
01:09:50you know, in the morning at warmup and figuring out you didn't, you need a different, a different
01:09:56needle in your carburetor. Yep. It's so much more going on. I remember hearing about one of the
01:10:05Spanish teams who, who had some at each track, they had somebody up the weather stream to say,
01:10:14well, now it's, uh, starting to rain a little bit and they could, they could make a plan based on
01:10:22what was about to happen to themselves. If, if the weather kept going the way it was going,
01:10:28um, looking for the pattern and things is, is just what humans do there. It used to be when there was a
01:10:38a total eclipse of the sun. People were horribly upset. Some committed suicide. The world is coming
01:10:48to an end. And then Isaac Newton and Leibniz and all those mathematical guys came up with a way of
01:10:57predicting, predicting when the next total eclipse would occur. And when it actually did occur as
01:11:06predicted, people were able to say, change the channel, will you hand me a beer? Because it was
01:11:13no longer news. And that's how we get understanding. It doesn't come in a sudden shazam. It comes from
01:11:24working on the data until you can squeeze out, uh, an understandable pattern. And as you say,
01:11:32which may lead to a predictive model, here's what's going to happen next.
01:11:37It makes me think of Rich Oliver. I interviewed Rich Oliver, you know, famously successful and
01:11:43dominant 250 Grand Prix racer in the United States. And, uh, I interviewed him at Laguna Seca. Um, it would
01:11:49have been around when he was doing the big business there, maybe 97 ish. Anyway,
01:11:58I was, I interviewed Rich and I said, well, Rich, you know, like, what do you do that's
01:12:04different? Like, how do you, how do you approach this? That gives brings you success. And he
01:12:08pulled out his notebook and he had notebooks for the tracks, everything that he'd ever done,
01:12:14every needle, every tire pressure, every suspension setting, spring rate, all of it was in the book.
01:12:21And he's the predictive, he's, he's the, uh, natural intelligence, not the artificial one.
01:12:27The net, he's the natural intelligence that is cataloging all of that and referring to it over and
01:12:34over again at every track and building the patterns. He said that about cornering, he said, well, you know,
01:12:40when you, when you, um, you get to a track that you've never seen, you have a catalog of corners
01:12:47in your mind that you've been through and you, you start to build the analogies like this corner
01:12:52reminds me of this. And I, I see that I can build this line to get through, to set up for this straight
01:12:58away, to do all of these things. And, and he would build his own, you know, lap efficient lap in that
01:13:05way. And now we have armies of people and computers and main, I don't know the, do we call them main
01:13:11frames anymore? I don't even know. So when you've got a phone, yeah, exactly. It's just, it's, uh,
01:13:20it's crazy. Well, I'm going to, um, we'll, we'll call it on that. Um, Ducati has started off the season
01:13:28with, um, pretty dominant performance. The Marquez brothers, as of this recording anyway, have done some
01:13:34pretty good work so far this season. You know, Mark's in the factory team and he's doing factory
01:13:41things and it's pretty, uh, it's pretty amazing to watch. So it is. And of course they had to hire him
01:13:51even if he didn't prove to be wonderful as he has done, because what if somebody else hired him
01:13:58and he proved to be wonderful? True. Better to have him on your side.
01:14:05Honda showed a glimmer, so maybe we'll be. Yeah, there, there, uh, and I think it's wonderful to see
01:14:11Zarco look like he hasn't just spent 12 hours on a bench rowing a Greek trireme across the
01:14:20Mediterranean. He just had that worn out worried look. And, and now it's, it's like the sun's
01:14:30about to come up. It's grand. Yep. Well, thanks for listening folks. That's another episode down
01:14:37of the cycle world podcast. Uh, we have more than 60 in the back catalog. And once again,
01:14:41thank you to Octane Lending for sponsoring the podcast. Uh, there's a click, a link you can click
01:14:47in the description to go check out prequal flex makes a difference. If you're shopping for a bike,
01:14:52uh, go see if you can get pre-qualified and, uh, buy the bike of your dreams, uh,
01:14:57using Octane Lending. Um, thanks for listening folks. We'll catch you next time.