Qatar Review: The answer's in the air

One swallow does not make a summer, but Casey Stoner is now a serious player in MotoGP. He may have been 'Crasher Stoner' in the past, but now he is "being listened to more in the team," he is married and he is at one with his life and his current situation. The guy is a different rider.

He beat Valentino Rossi in a fair and square race at the weekend, and there are not too many riders who can say that. I say 'fair and square' because the 21-year-old Australian managed to withstand the pressure as the number 46 plate harried him for the entire 22-lap race.

There is a top speed advantage with the Ducati, yes, but you still have to ride the rest of the lap with the Yamaha trying to pass. I was extremely impressed by his ride, and many other observers were too.

Casey Stoner, Ducati, winner of the Qatar Grand Prix © Reuters

Many have buckled under the pressure of Rossi behind them. Can one imagine standing in goal if Beckham is going to take the free kick? Or being in a play-off against Tiger Woods? Or starting the last lap with Senna right up behind your gearbox? Stoner withstood that pressure and was almost "yeah, whatever" after the race.

He didn't seem surprised nor overawed at his massive achievement, nor aware of the landmark ride he had just done in winning the first ever MotoGP 800cc race, and indeed a back-to-back for Ducati spanning different eras of racing. That's no different from Rossi winning back to back races on two different types of motorcycle, (03-04, Honda to Yamaha) and for that achievement, Ducati should be proud.

I don't go along with comparing riders to previous legends such as Doohan or Bayliss, for example, because everyone is an individual in their own right, each with their own character. But Stoner is different from many others on that grid at the moment in that he really is not bothered by the whole phenomenon that is Valentino Rossi. And that will have to be his key for future success. No one has out moved the Rossi/Jeremy Burgess engineering power in recent years, but they were out foxed in Qatar.

"We were too cautious and ended up with a lot of fuel on board," team manager Davide Brivio was quoted as saying in Gazzetta dello Sport on Monday. "It's the Japanese mentality: they did thousands of calculations, but then took almost no risks at all."

Maybe the Yamaha engineers are still hurting from squandering 25 points at Le Mans last year with an engine blow-up and decided to turn the wick down rather than keep it at what they knew from testing.

During the entire weekend, the whole feeling around the teams that had no top speed was that the Ducatis could not sustain the race pace they had shown in testing, nor during practice at Losail. But the hard facts were there for all to see.

Stoner's 19-lap run during 'Free Practice 3' on Friday morning was his key to the race victory. Averaging out at a lap time of 1:56.945 and an average top speed of 317.9 km/h, that performance compares to his average (flying) lap time in the race of 1:57.081 and an average top speed of 311.5 km/h. It has to be said that there was much more wind in the face of the riders on race day than on Friday, but that was the same for all. Same sized gaps between each.

Even the most idiotic of scatter-brained engineers would not run an engine that fast, guzzling that much fuel, or with only qualifiers in during all practice, only to be hamstrung for the race. In fact, for Ducati to make the decision to keep the same ECU map all weekend and insist that an 18/19 lap run had to be done at some point, was a decision from Filippo Preziosi, the Ducati technical director, I understand.

The rear of the Ducati Desmosedici GP7 © DPPI

"You cannot play with fuel through Free Practice. Maybe through qualifying at the end, but you have to keep it at a similar set up," said team manager Livio Suppo after the race, backing up his engineer's decision.

Let people not under estimate the input from Shell in this whole development of the 800cc Ducati. They have worked hand-in-glove with Ducati since the start of the entire MotoGP projects with oil and fuel.

Figures gained with the V4 include nearly 6bhp on sheer power, but more importantly there has been a measured fuel consumption reduction of 5 percent. All of these figures are from the 990cc engine, but the whole strength that this gives Ducati when entering the 800cc era is massive now that there is one litre less allowed in the tank this season, plus the fact that engines are revving higher.

Another angle of the fuel chemist's brief is that now, instead of having to quell the enormous power of a 990cc engine, giving it the grunt out of a corner, an 800cc engine is a true screaming device. The consumption, rev and burn rate of the fuel has been tied in with Ducati opting to take that screamer engine right from the word go.

"Power is never enough," said Livio Suppo after the race. "The idea of making a big bang engine is never right for an engineer. It's wrong and against his perfect ideas."

With Piero Ferrari on the board of Ducati, and Shell providing a different make-up of fuel to Ferrari for nearly every different race track on the Formula One calendar, there is a gold mine of information just up the road from Bologna, and Ducati have tapped into this.

Formula One blends include the 'desert' fuel for high temperature races, 'top-end' for wide-open throttle races such as Indy and Montreal and 'pick-up' for Monaco. This is no PR spiel; they have utilised the resources of an outside supplier with massive experience in other fields, just as they have with Magnetti Marelli and a large number of their programmers back in Ducati Corse.

The decision of Ducati taking their Desmodromic valves into MotoGP is not just marketing either as the system has very low frictional losses, but quite what it can do when revs rise in the future remains to be seen.

The other angle of attack that has been tackled by Ducati, and one that I harped on about during the TV broadcast, is aerodynamics. The maker or breaker for an F1 car, MotoGP's aero has never really been tackled with such efficiency in recent times.

Having a race bike to look like a road bike is one way of marketing you road machines 18 times a year in front of millions of people, but if it struggles in a straight line on long straights, then that is where the engineers and the PR stylists clash. One might think that the stylists are sitting through some uncomfortable meetings in Japan this week...

Carl Fogarty, Ducati 996 © Reuters

The top speed figures speak for themselves. The slowest Stoner speed over 21 passages through the trap during the race was 309.9 km/h. The fastest Rossi speed was 302.4 km/h, Pedrosa 308.8 km/h, Hopkins 305.3 km/h and Melandri 304.3 km/h. Alex Barros was 316.3 km/h (fastest of the entire race) and Hoffman 314.3 km/h. Go figure.

I know those figures have struck home into the Japanese factories. Honda may say that a smaller fairing turns in the corners better, aiding the agility of the motorcycle, and I am sure they are right. Hayden got a 'stop gap' fairing to aid his broad shoulders from being caught in the airflow in Qatar, but he didn't seem too enamoured by it.

The facts of physics do not go away. Once at terminal velocity, you need eight times the power to go twice as fast - or 30 percent more power to go 10 percent faster. So, that's why F1 teams put so much effort into aerodynamics with two wind tunnels running 24-hour days - 336 hour weeks!

The Ducati fairing is pretty similar to the 2006 machine. A few tweaks, but pretty much the same. Englishman Alan Jenkins has been in the wind tunnel - in the UK it has to be said - for many, many hours. He knows a thing or two about fluid dynamics having engineered and designed F1 cars together with assisting victorious Swiss America's Cup boat Alinghi.

Quiet and measured, many people don't know who he is in a MotoGP paddock, but his wind tunnel time has really made a difference to the Ducati 800s, never mind how beautiful the Desmosedici RR road bike is!

"We've got some good things going on with Stoner in that he is the right shape," he said. "He's slim, his weight is about right (58kg) but most of all, he has a long back. That means that the air passing over his back literally does just that. It doesn't get stalled around his backside, causing drag.

"The unluckiest guy was Fogarty as he had an arched back and that meant he lost out on top speed as the air curled up behind him. Another advantage with Stoner is that because he's from that 125 and 250 school, he knows if you put your elbow out in the wind you can literally see the revs go down. He tucks in and stays in."

Jenkins says that aero is vital for straight-line speed and he added: "The speeds we see over 300 km/h are more to do with aero as at the end of a long straight the bike really isn't accelerating much. The faster it goes, the more effect of aero there is. In 3rd and 4th gear the grunt is important, but then aero kicks in." Perfect. Ducati have got the grunt from the fuel and Shell, and the aero from hours and hours in a wind tunnel.

As Mr Honda said all those years ago: 'no-one buys a slow motorcycle, and no-one buys one that breaks down.' I wonder when we will see a new Yamaha or Honda fairing coming out? For some riders' sake, they hope the sky will not be full of too many swallows or the summer will be well and truly upon us.