When it was announced that the claiming rule was to be dropped and the rules would be changed for 2014, one of the main questions was what to call the new class. After some complaining early on, MotoGP fans had become used to the CRT name, and understood what was meant by it.
With the choice of software now determining how much fuel and how many engines a team can use – 24 liters for the spec Dorna software, 20 liters for factories using their custom software with the spec Magneti Marelli ECU – there was no easy and obvious nomenclature for the bikes.
Under the first draft of the rules, the bikes were divided into two categories: “MotoGP” and “MotoGP with factory option”. That appears to have encountered resistance, however, and so a new name has been found for the non-factory bikes: for 2014, non-factory bikes will be referred to as ‘Open’ entries.
There is of course a small irony in the fact that the new “Open” class bikes will have less freedom than the factory option bikes, having both ECU and software closed, but with more fuel available, they will at least not be strangulated by the factory option’s fuel restriction.
It is not currently known whether Dorna will continue with the separate championship for the CRT bikes, now renamed “Open”.
If the customer bikes are competitive with satellite machinery, they may choose to drop the nomenclature, but if the Open class bikes are finishing around where Aleix Espargaro is finishing on the ART, then they may decide to keep it, to give the private teams some extra publicity.
One concession has been made to wild cards, which could prove important. In the interests of reducing development costs, wild cards have been excluded from using the Magneti Marelli ECU and software.
This opens the way for Suzuki to enter as a wildcard using the current version of its Mitsubishi ECU and software, while the engineers continue to work on porting their current codebase to the Magneti Marelli hardware.
It also makes the newly discarded Aprilia ART bikes an attractive prospect for wild card teams: exempt from using the spec Dorna hardware and software, any wild card entry fielding the Aprilia ART machine can continue to use Aprilia’s custom hardware and software.
The full text of the regulations and the detailed technical specifications may be viewed on here.
Source: FIM; Photo: © 2013 Jensen Beeler / Asphalt & Rubber – Creative Commons – Attribution 3.0
This article was originally published on MotoMatters, and is republished here on Asphalt & Rubber with permission by the author.
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