After being rained out yesterday, the Qatar GP, at the Losail International Circuit, finally got its green flag today. There was however a good omen to the start of the season, question mark riders Dani Pedrosa and Nicky Hayden made it onto the starting grid and finished a respectable result. We don’t want to give away anymore of the MotoGP season opener, so continue reading for all the spoilers.
Entries for the upcoming TTXGP have been announced, and five teams have entered to run the Isle of Man on electric wheels. Mission Motors, EVO Design Solutions, Kingston University, Brammo, and Motorczysz will make up the field. The teams have just 64 more days to get their bikes ready for competition, which could be a tall order for some of them, whose bikes still only exist as CAD drawings.
We have a very reserved opinion on how TTXGP will go down. While these teams have been able to gain a great deal of attention in the blogsphere about their projects, it would seem virtually all of them haven’t actually built even a prototype yet (excluding Brammo). In the tech industry, we call this Vaporware, and with less than 10 weeks before race day, we have a hard time conceiving how all these teams will be able to deliver in this short of a time frame. Never-the-less, the TTXGP will be a big day not only for electric motorcycle racing, but also for electric motorcycles in general. Continue reading for a description of each team from their press releases.
Dani Pedrosa has confirmed that he will be racing at Qatar for the opener of the MotoGP season. Pedrosa has been sidelined since a crash while testing, which led to him needing surgery on his leg and arm. Speaking on his blog at repsol.com, the Spaniard announced that he had decided at the last minute to head to Losail, and to risk further injury by riding.
Spain’s BeOn Automotive has developed a kit capable of converting popular 450cc motocross bikes into single-cylinder road racers for little effort and cost. The concept isn’t new, Roland Sands Designs has been making single-cylinder racers for some time now, and the racing class is alive and well in Southern California, but having a bolt-on kit like this is much needed first. Like the RSD SuperSingles, the Project 450GP kit utilizes the stock frame frame and engine, and only swaps components like the suspension, bodywork and wheels.
Today Marco Melandri confirmed that he has signed a one-year contract with Hayate Racing to race in this year’s MotoGP championship that will replace his previous two-year contract with Kawasaki.
The deal is a costly one for Melandri, both financially and in terms of his ability to compete. “I had to make a big financial sacrifice, but the most important thing that I wanted was to find trust,” he told MotoGP. Throughout the last test at Qatar, Melandri complained of issues with rear grip, a similar complaint he had with the Kawasaki, and he expressed his hope that these problems could be fixed quickly.
“I have nothing to lose. One month ago I had one foot outside the World Championship, and now I have a team that is working solely for me. My motivation is this, and to show Kawasaki that they made a mistake in choosing to pull out their factory support.”
In another month’s time, at the season opener at Qatar, we shall see whether Melandri’s hope as justified.
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Harald Bartol, who heads the KTM 125cc & 250cc GP teams, has revealed that the Austrian company was the first to use a Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) on Tommy Koyama’s racebike last year. KERS was first fitted to Koyama’s bike during the 125cc GP in Valencia last year, and KTM is looking to explore how KERS could be applied in other racing applications and production motorcycles.
The Grand Prix Commission has announced a slew of new rules for MotoGP, supposedly aimed at cutting costs in MotoGP, and thus allowing the manufacturers and teams to compete despite the world’s economic situation.
The new measures include the following:
The FIM MotoGP World Championship will arrive in Bulgaria as of 2012, following a preliminary agreement reached between the Bulgarian Motorcycle Federation and Dorna Sports, the commercial rights holder for MotoGP. The new five year deal, which will take MotoGP to Bulgaria from 2012 to 2016, marks another step into Eastern Europe for MotoGP, and who recently signed a similar deal for a Hungarian GP.
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Track modifications at the Silverstone circuit look set to make it one of the fastest circuits on the MotoGP calendar, when the MotoGP series heads to the Northamptonshire venue from 2010 onwards. The new Silverstone circuit, which will feature a spectacular new section of track running from the approach at Abbey corner to a tightening ‘Arrowhead’ hairpin at the inside of Becketts, will measure 3.5 miles in length, a third of a mile longer than the existing Grand Prix circuit.
Based on mathematical simulations, HOK Sport, one of the world’s leading sports architecture firms, has calculated that the average lap time for MotoGP riders around the new track would be 1’51.456, racing at an average speed of 113 mph, almost 2mph faster than at Phillip Island, which is currently the fastest circuit in MotoGP.
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Marco Melandri has announced on his Facebook profile his intentions for the upcoming MotoGP season. According to the Italian press, Melandri wrote “for the moment, we will test the bike at Losail, we will see whether it’s going to be worth racing the bike after the test: if the bike’s a disaster, we will all go home.”
Furthermore, GPOne.com is reporting that the Italian will be riding an updated version of the 2008 bike at Qatar, which was tested at Valencia and Phillip Island earlier in the testing season. Melandri had previously rejected trying to race this bike, but as this point riding the quasi-2008 bike is better than no ride at all.
Whether this is just idle speculation or a genuine plan, we will see soon enough. The Qatar tests take place at the end of next week, and if Melandri is there on a Kawasaki, we will finally get an inkling of how this story will end.
BMW Motorrad has made a timely release of some studio shots of the S1000RR WSBK race bike as they take to , right down to the off-center windscreen. One of these days, BMW will hire a painter who isn’t constricted to colors and designs from the 1970’s. Until then, we’ll have to let the test times from PI speak for themselves.
Relax people, its only Tuesday.
