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Its hard to compare past results in a prototype class. There's only one Yamaha, out of four, which is competitive right now.

I agree with your point, but you massively missed my point. A bike which can handle better being less powerful can win, but it takes a very talented rider among a group of talented riders to pull it off.

Fabio is carrying Yamaha.

https://www.r1-forum.com/ :p
 
bp_SFV4 said:
Its hard to compare past results in a prototype class. There's only one Yamaha, out of four, which is competitive right now.

I agree with your point, but you massively missed my point. A bike which can handle better being less powerful can win, but it takes a very talented rider among a group of talented riders to pull it off.

Fabio is carrying Yamaha.

https://www.r1-forum.com/ :p
Click to expand...

Nope, I fully understood your point.
 
MaverickiB said:
The problem is you view the problem as simpler than it is. Of course it sounds like a logical answer when you simplify it that way, but reality isn't so kind.

It's difficult enough to design for performance, now you have to also design for ease of removing the battery. These batteries are water cooled, so you have to have a system that's easy to disconnect not only the power cables but the water cooling piping without making a mess. Install has to be equally as easy and the coolant system has to be super easy to bleed.

Keep in mind it takes 10 minutes of DC fast charging NOW to go 0 to 80 percent on those bikes. MotoE bikes do not run down to 0 battery charge. In fact, the race length is dictated the way it is because they are not allowed to go below 60ish percent by the end of the race. Unlike gas machines, electrics get weaker as battery voltage drops which means racing gets less exciting.

So with CURRENT tech, the way things are RIGHT NOW, if they wanted to juice up and keep racing it would require about 2 minutes to go from 60 to 90 or so (charging slows above 90 because that's when cell balancing occurs). Unlike with fuel, which requires waiting until everything else is done before you can dump in the gas, charging can begin the moment the bike pulls up and occur while wheels and whatnot are being swapped out.

Is that fast enough? I'd agree with you, it isn't... right now. But if things are that quick right now and not contingent on new tech or anything, they're very close to reaching the levels of performance you desire.

Your alternative would requiring going back to the drawing board entirely. It's like training to run a marathon under 2 hours for years, you get your time down to 2 hours and 5 minutes, then saying, "This isn't working, I'm gonna start over and change my goal to a 9 second 100m dash."

It's also impressive you seriously believe it's not a massive engineering challenge to design a method to swap out a 200+lb battery in less than 2 minutes. Try to see if you can swap out your bike's battery right now in under 2 minutes.
Click to expand...


Well yes that was exactly my point, doing it completely different from zero. It has nothing to do with my Panigale's battery hahaha. What's that got to do with anything?
Yes it is exactly a complete and total switch after training forever with ICE, they've switched to electric motors. It's all a massive new challenge with a whole new team of people, new facilities etc. There was an economy to what they decided to tackle this round and what they chose was a slower bike that runs short races. They could have done anything and they did that.
You can list all the possible engineering challenges, then we can solve each one right here in text hahaaa.
I was working on it, we have designs. Some of the best engineers in the world are working on it for specialty vehicles. I'm not going to post on a forum what they're working on though. But yes you're right, it's a race in developing what's going to be the next thing. For passenger cars it's probably no longer necessary as fast charging is compelling even though it reduces the life of batteries quite a bit which is pretty expensive. But we're not talking about cars we're talking about pushing the extremes of performance in prototype motorcycle racing.
I haven't built one, I don't work for Ducati, I just have an opinion based on what I know. Would it be a better bike? I don't know - no one's made one. I think it's compelling. Better storage would be better.
 
Vbreeze said:
Well yes that was exactly my point, doing it completely different from zero. It has nothing to do with my Panigale's battery hahaha. What's that got to do with anything?
Yes it is exactly a complete and total switch after training forever with ICE, they've switched to electric motors. It's all a massive new challenge with a whole new team of people, new facilities etc. There was an economy to what they decided to tackle this round and what they chose was a slower bike that runs short races. They could have done anything and they did that.
You can list all the possible engineering challenges, then we can solve each one right here in text hahaaa.
I was working on it, we have designs. Some of the best engineers in the world are working on it for specialty vehicles. I'm not going to post on a forum what they're working on though. But yes you're right, it's a race in developing what's going to be the next thing. For passenger cars it's probably no longer necessary as fast charging is compelling even though it reduces the life of batteries quite a bit which is pretty expensive. But we're not talking about cars we're talking about pushing the extremes of performance in prototype motorcycle racing.
I haven't built one, I don't work for Ducati, I just have an opinion based on what I know. Would it be a better bike? I don't know - no one's made one. I think it's compelling. Better storage would be better.
Click to expand...

My point is 2 minutes becomes a very short period of time when doing anything mechanical. Isle of Man pit stops take roughly a minute for the fastest most experienced teams. That's how long it takes to swap out wheels (often just the rear one), fuel up, and maybe get a new visor. You're talking about swapping out the entiee stress member of a motorcycle in that same amount of time. It just isn't realistic at all.

Fast charging doesnt damage the batteries as much as it is claimed or made out. For example, the Energica Ego I had was a 2018 (older model) and the battery was rated for 2000 cycles. Energica is known for lowballing like crazy (complete opposite of other italian brands) so I'd say this isn't a far fetched number. That bike got roughly 100 miles to a charge. The cycle rating is based on degradation to 80 percent, so 2000 full charge/discharge cycles would leave the battery holding 80 percent of the juice it could hold when it was brand new.

2000 x 100 = 200000. 200k miles before the previous generation battery has degraded to 80 percent capacity. Energicas can DC fast charge out of the box, so this capability was factored into cycle life (probably why it's so low). Guys with 50k miles on their Energicas now have noticed less degradation than the manual states they should have.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, it just seems like this is an area you're very limited in experience with and therefore a lot of what you're saying just doesn't quite line up with reality. In performance vehicles, the goal is performance. Having to design in a way that allows the battery to be removed will impede performance developments (for example, it would be better to put the coolant pump over here but ah ...., we cant remove the battery if we do that). You also severely underestimate the level of safety precautions they take on these machines, especially after the big MotoE paddock fire.

Say this out loud:
"I want you to connect this battery carrying enough voltage to kill you 100 times over... and I want you to do it as fast as humanly possible."

Clearly that's a hazardous situation. No big deal! We will engineer super safe rapid connectors ($$$) that weigh more than basic connections.

You're missing the nature of racing engineering. One of the beautiful things about top spec racing machines is they're so complicated in operation but the solutions are beautifully simple. You see charging being slow as a problem so you fantasize of these grand engineering solutions for rapidly changing batteries. A racing engineer just slaps a slightly bigger cooling fan on the charging module so it can pull more juice without overheating. Like I said in the very beginning of this discussion, hot swapping batteries solves a problem that is already very close to not existing at all.
 
SuperDomestique said:
A little more analysis than the press release Motorcycle.com article

https://motomatters.com/analysis/2022/07/01/ducati_s_motoe_launch_the_role_of_racing.html
Key takeaways…

Power to weight
21L 0.6 Nm/kg
Energica 0.8 Nm/kg

Achieves same speed down front straight of Mugello.
Click to expand...

An interesting read.

Regarding the bikes torque output... it's a lot! More than can be used with the tires they race with. The current MotoE bikes are so torque managed it's ridiculous... I've seen them struggle for traction until almost reaching their top speed.
 
Alkhater said:
An interesting read.

Regarding the bikes torque output... it's a lot! More than can be used with the tires they race with. The current MotoE bikes are so torque managed it's ridiculous... I've seen them struggle for traction until almost reaching their top speed.
Click to expand...

I read a good analysis wherein it said another reason for the short races is tires get absolutely obliterated on electric bikes. In ICE machines, the power pulses from the motor give the tire carcass brief moments to recover. But when you apply the power on an electric, it's all power all the time. The carcass has no chance to recover so it gets ripped apart way faster. So tire technology has some development it needs to make before these things can do 15-20 laps as well.
 
MaverickiB said:
I read a good analysis wherein it said another reason for the short races is tires get absolutely obliterated on electric bikes. In ICE machines, the power pulses from the motor give the tire carcass brief moments to recover. But when you apply the power on an electric, it's all power all the time. The carcass has no chance to recover so it gets ripped apart way faster. So tire technology has some development it needs to make before these things can do 15-20 laps as well.
Click to expand...

Presumably, ICE only make peak torque (120Nm for MotoGP) for a short time period during acceleration. Whereas the E bikes are making 200Nm constantly. Tyre shred city.
 
MaverickiB said:
I read a good analysis wherein it said another reason for the short races is tires get absolutely obliterated on electric bikes. In ICE machines, the power pulses from the motor give the tire carcass brief moments to recover. But when you apply the power on an electric, it's all power all the time. The carcass has no chance to recover so it gets ripped apart way faster. So tire technology has some development it needs to make before these things can do 15-20 laps as well.
Click to expand...

Electric motors deliver their power in pulses as well though.

I would say bike weight is the other factor in tire degradation differences.
 
MaverickiB said:
My point is 2 minutes becomes a very short period of time when doing anything mechanical. Isle of Man pit stops take roughly a minute for the fastest most experienced teams. That's how long it takes to swap out wheels (often just the rear one), fuel up, and maybe get a new visor. You're talking about swapping out the entiee stress member of a motorcycle in that same amount of time. It just isn't realistic at all.

Fast charging doesnt damage the batteries as much as it is claimed or made out. For example, the Energica Ego I had was a 2018 (older model) and the battery was rated for 2000 cycles. Energica is known for lowballing like crazy (complete opposite of other italian brands) so I'd say this isn't a far fetched number. That bike got roughly 100 miles to a charge. The cycle rating is based on degradation to 80 percent, so 2000 full charge/discharge cycles would leave the battery holding 80 percent of the juice it could hold when it was brand new.

2000 x 100 = 200000. 200k miles before the previous generation battery has degraded to 80 percent capacity. Energicas can DC fast charge out of the box, so this capability was factored into cycle life (probably why it's so low). Guys with 50k miles on their Energicas now have noticed less degradation than the manual states they should have.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, it just seems like this is an area you're very limited in experience with and therefore a lot of what you're saying just doesn't quite line up with reality. In performance vehicles, the goal is performance. Having to design in a way that allows the battery to be removed will impede performance developments (for example, it would be better to put the coolant pump over here but ah ...., we cant remove the battery if we do that). You also severely underestimate the level of safety precautions they take on these machines, especially after the big MotoE paddock fire.

Say this out loud:
"I want you to connect this battery carrying enough voltage to kill you 100 times over... and I want you to do it as fast as humanly possible."

Clearly that's a hazardous situation. No big deal! We will engineer super safe rapid connectors ($$$) that weigh more than basic connections.

You're missing the nature of racing engineering. One of the beautiful things about top spec racing machines is they're so complicated in operation but the solutions are beautifully simple. You see charging being slow as a problem so you fantasize of these grand engineering solutions for rapidly changing batteries. A racing engineer just slaps a slightly bigger cooling fan on the charging module so it can pull more juice without overheating. Like I said in the very beginning of this discussion, hot swapping batteries solves a problem that is already very close to not existing at all.
Click to expand...

You're pointing to limitations. ok.
I'm pointing to solutions that exist.
I never said "swap out a stress member," or underestimate safety blah blah blah. omg. There's a difference between having an interesting conversation and ranting.
I'm inexperienced building MotoGP bikes. Yes.
How many MotoGP bikes have you designed?

It's all congecture here.
 
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Vbreeze said:
You're pointing to limitations. ok.
I'm pointing to solutions that exist.
I never said "swap out a stress member," or underestimate safety blah blah blah. omg. There's a difference between having an interesting conversation and ranting.
I'm inexperienced building MotoGP bikes. Yes.
How many MotoGP bikes have you designed?

It's all congecture here.
Click to expand...

I'm just pointing out your solutions only exist when you pretend certain aspects of reality don't. You can *maybe* suggest designing a motorcycle with a 200lb metal box that can be swapped out in under 2 minutes. But then when you add the reality of that metal box being very dangerous, having a water cooling system, and the design not interfering with performance at all, 2 minutes is basically impossible without the whole process being automated by robots.

I guess what the whole point of this discussion is, your idea of a replaceable battery to circumvent charging times is an idea of yesteryear. When electrics were in their infancy, it was a legitimate idea. But now that charging has sped up exponentially, it's an archaic one. I may not have designed a MotoGP bike but I have technically owned a MotoE bike, as I had an Energica Ego and did all the work on it myself. The differences between the Ego and its MotoE counterpart are few, just software (MotoE software removes top speed limit) and extra inverter cooling. I am very familiar with the design of the machine and its limitations. It would take some very bright minds and millions of dollars to design a battery swap system faster than me hooking up to a Wal-Mart DC charger and being all juiced up in the amount of time it takes me to eat a candy bar.
 
MaverickiB said:
... It would take some very bright minds and millions of dollars to design a battery swap system faster than me hooking up to a Wal-Mart DC charger and being all juiced up in the amount of time it takes me to eat a candy bar.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification.
That's what Ducati just did. They took some years and millions of dollars and designed a MotoGP bike from ZERO. That was my point.
With all the handling challenges that Ducati GP program has had with the L shaped motor / engine as a stress member etc., my jaw dropped open when I heard them say they did the same type of thing again when they started from ZERO.
A brick in the middle as a stress member... It's what they're good at I guess. Ok. Now with the batteries inside the brick as a stress member.
Seems like painting themselves into a corner. You get they do this sometimes because of marketing right? They have limited the GP bikes evolution keeping within some definition of what currently sells in the shops.

I don't have a MotoGP bike either but I was general manager for a self driving electric vehicle company with hot-swappable batteries and currently have a 25% stake. I designed some aspects of the connection system and general concept. It's not a 5 years form now thing, it's a right now thing.
I'm lead teams of engineers for a living. I'm the guy who brings them crazy ideas, and then we solve them after someone inevitably cries, "oh no that's impossible!"
I've been hearing that's "dangerous expensive and impossible" for 20 years in Silicon Valley. And for 20 years, I've been proving doubters wrong.
I'm just telling you this so you might consider I'm not entirely talking out of my ass and I've actually thought about the subject a little with practical experience.
 
Vbreeze said:
With all the handling challenges that Ducati GP program has had with the L shaped motor / engine as a stress member etc., my jaw dropped open when I heard them say they did the same type of thing again when they started from ZERO.
A brick in the middle as a stress member... It's what they're good at I guess. Ok. Now with the batteries inside the brick as a stress member.
Seems like painting themselves into a corner. You get they do this sometimes because of marketing right? They have limited the GP bikes evolution keeping within some definition of what currently sells in the shops.
Click to expand...
Why is having the engine as a stressed member a limiting factor? It's not like a full chassis bike would have its motor in a drastically different position.

Yes it makes it more of a challenge to achieve the desired chassis flex but it's a lighter concept. What am I missing?
 
I'd go so far as to say its more desirable as you could increase the volume of the space the battery back could occupy if it were a stressed member.
 
80% in 20 minutes gives say 6 laps? With a bit more tweaking they could have a track day weapon as almost no one goes out more than once an hour, wonder how much charge it will accept in 60 minutes? The thing is you only need to make it useful not perfect. Its much easier to build on a body of knowledge then refine until you are ready for new tech to give the next leap. Hot swappable might be very desirable in a rental fleet but how many races are back to back, I presume its a lot heavier to build a swappable system and we dont know how integrated the cooling system is with the battery pack, perhaps that's a reason as well?
 
Paul G said:
80% in 20 minutes gives say 6 laps? With a bit more tweaking they could have a track day weapon as almost no one goes out more than once an hour, wonder how much charge it will accept in 60 minutes? The thing is you only need to make it useful not perfect. Its much easier to build on a body of knowledge then refine until you are ready for new tech to give the next leap. Hot swappable might be very desirable in a rental fleet but how many races are back to back, I presume its a lot heavier to build a swappable system and we dont know how integrated the cooling system is with the battery pack, perhaps that's a reason as well?
Click to expand...

I know a few guys who have taken their Energicas out to the track. Level 2 (240V charging) and they are able to go to every session except for one or two. They plug it in right away after coming off the track and usually just have to skip the session before lunch and the last session of the day. If DC charging were available, current EV motorcycles could go a whole track day without missing a session.

As I said before, MotoE rules state bikes can have no less than somewhere around 60-70% battery by the end of the race. The bikes are capable of longer races, but for the sake of entertainment, they made them shorter. Otherwise you'd see lap times get slower and slower throughout, with guys struggling to make any big position moves.

Only reason why nobody has launched a rental fleet is current EV bikes are expensive! Zeros perform poorly for the money, Energicas perform well but are expensive new, and Harleys are way overpriced. It would also require a track infrastructure that can support it. Somewhere like Auto Club Speedway would be a great spot for an electric rental fleet, with multiple outlets in each bay. Chuckwalla... yeah not gonna happen any time soon.
 
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Paul G said:
80% in 20 minutes gives say 6 laps? With a bit more tweaking they could have a track day weapon as almost no one goes out more than once an hour, wonder how much charge it will accept in 60 minutes? The thing is you only need to make it useful not perfect. Its much easier to build on a body of knowledge then refine until you are ready for new tech to give the next leap. Hot swappable might be very desirable in a rental fleet but how many races are back to back, I presume its a lot heavier to build a swappable system and we dont know how integrated the cooling system is with the battery pack, perhaps that's a reason as well?
Click to expand...

I think you nailed it. They know the thing they have, so they're going with it, plus prolly cool talking points.

@Alkhater it is indeed an elegant solution that I've appreciated like the single sided swing arm and all the other Ducati delights. Though the engine as a stress member has bitten them for years with the limitations in... like you said, the flexibility of the frame competing with handling ability. In combo with the 90°L engine with 2 pistons forward and 2 up, it made the bike longer, longer wheel-base than the inline 4's. First try solution, carbon fiber monocoque, should have been the magical solution.
Rossi was screaming for "aluminum frames, how about an 85°V, fk give me something that turns!" while Ducati was screaming, "everything in the shops are trellis frames, 90°L engine, we want to try CF. " Disaster, largely because...
"SINGLE TIRE MANUFACTURER rule / Honda gets to win every race for a few years." Wow Marc sure looked amazing there for a while. (He's great, but on any other team, 8 would have been maybe 5, 6 - I don't know - not 8 though. No f'ing way. He had it handed to him on a platter.)
Anyway the GP22 still doesn't turn well enough. Bagnaia is on his ass too often. Not always because he's drunk. ;P (You guys see that? Ibiza, he went into the weeds at 3AM post-disco)
Other subject:
This is that subject where Ducatisti question what is a Ducati referring to its bits.
Is it a trellis frame, double headlight, desmodromic valve system, exhaust under the saddle, dry clutch, V2... All the stuff that everyone cried about as it went away?
The ebikes are a new deal.

One thing is certain in MotoE 2023, a Ducati is going to win every single race, on whatever tire they choose
So a you're all right, not all of this matters. Just opining.
😂
 

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