HOW DID DUCATI TAKE ADVANTAGE?

Technically speaking, they just did what they could within the rules, but they only did that thanks to an aggressive approach. But what is this aggressive approach, I hear you ask? Well, as our expert aerodynamicist points out, it’s basically about attacking the rulebook as savagely as possible – which has been happening in Formula One for decades. By employing ex-F1 personnel, the Ducati squad eyed every loophole and looked into every nook and cranny – with the most obvious being how they bypassed the necessity to homologate two sets of fairings for wings, to use throughout the entire year in 2016. Danny Aldridge, MotoGP Technical Director, employed this rule so teams couldn’t have different sets of wings at every track, and in turn help to keep costs down. Yet Ducati were really clever; the rulebook said that a machine could still be legible to finish a race with less material than the homologated fairing design – which Danny implemented so that if a rider had crashed and remounted, or damaged the wing in a collision, they could still finish the race and not be penalised. Ducati capitalised on this and released their bike for homologation with the full bike set of wings, all intertwined. Then, where other teams had two sets to choose from, at every race they turned up with they had a different set of wings; literally just trimming the fat off when it wasn’t necessary, and sticking it back on when they needed it. That’s how they run different wings every weekend to work perfectly with the track… thanks to an F1 engineer looking at the rules in a different light.