Ducati Building Aluminium Chassis As Parallel Project
Ever since Valentino Rossi ended the first Valencia MotoGP test in lowly 15th place on the Ducati Desmosedici, one-and-three-quarter seconds behind fastest man and former teammate Jorge Lorenzo, there have been calls for radical changes to Ducati's MotoGP machine. Those calls have only intensified as the season has progressed, the switch from the GP11 to the GP11.1, the destroked version of Ducati's 2012 MotoGP machine, having brought little improvement until a few key parts were introduced at Brno.
The focus of much of the fans' anger and the paddock's scepticism has been Ducati's monocoque carbon fiber chassis. Ducati's radically different design has been pinpointed as the obvious culprit for the problems with the Desmosedici, with critics pointing to the success the Japanese factories have had with an aluminium twin spar chassis, as exemplified by Yamaha's Deltabox concept. If Ducati had an aluminium twin spar frame, the argument goes, they would at least be confronting the Japanese on equal footing.
Crucially, the criticism has come not just from outside of Ducati, but both Valentino Rossi and his long-time crew chief Jeremy Burgess as well. Both Rossi and his crew chief have called for Ducati to run a parallel project to design an aluminium chassis to test whether such a chassis would bring an improvement. By running two different projects in parallel, the argument runs, the pace of development of the Desmosedici could greatly increased as the data from the two projects is analyzed.
