Racing should encourage technical diversity and the joy of experimentation, but it has rarely done so, at least not since the so-called golden age of the 1960s, when inline six-cylinder Honda four-stroke engines fought for victory with V4 Yamaha two-stroke engines.
That fun ended in the late 1960s – the wildest of decades in any realm – when people realized that it just couldn’t go on like this. Honda, Yamaha and all the others couldn’t spend forever like NASA.
The technical regulations have therefore been rewritten to forbid the wildest engineering fantasies and to replace them with more sensible, more restricted technical rules.
Of course, some factories still wanted to do things differently – with crazy blue-sky thinking for the racetrack that might somehow bring some joy to the road driver.
In the late 1970s, Honda had its NR500 four-stroke, 22,000-rpm, 22,000-rpm eight-valve-per-cylinder oval-piston, the factory’s idiotic attempt to beat the two-stroke. It was an amazing bike, but it didn’t score a single Grand Prix point.
A few years later, Honda built their first NSR500 with the fuel tank under the engine and the expansion chambers over the top, which looked a bit like a church organ. The idea was to increase cornering performance by lowering the center of gravity. The bike proved this wasn’t a good idea. One had learned more.
A decade later, the Italian factory Aprilia entered the premier class for the first time. The rest of the grid was all 500cc V4 two-stroke, but the little Italian factory entered the game with a bored and petted version of their successful V-Twin 250 GP motorcycle. Aprilia raced and developed the bike over six seasons, but never quite beat the most powerful V4s.
Aprilia was the closest to victory, being Jeremy McWilliams’ hard-fought podium in the wet 2000 British GP, less than a second behind Valentino Rossi and the latest iteration of Honda’s NSR.
In 2002, the inaugural season of the 990cc MotoGP four-stroke, Aprilia made things different again. While Honda built its wondrous five-cylinder RC211V and Suzuki and Yamaha built their less-than-wondrous four-cylinder GSV-R and YZR-M1, Aprilia built its RS3 triple.
The RS3 was the best sounding MotoGP bike of them all and was the first to break the 200 mile barrier during practice for the 2002 Italian GP at Mugello, but that was as good as it could get.
Aprilia’s RS3 Triple – One of the Scariest Motorcycles in Modern MotoGP History?
Aprilia
Its engine was developed by Formula 1 company Cosworth and, like most bike kits developed by Formula 1, didn’t work very well in a motorcycle. RS3 rider Colin Edwards famously said this about cycling: “You take a bull, cut his balls, dangle them in front of his face and then climb onto his back.”
The RS3 lasted three seasons without disturbing the top 5 even once. After that debacle, Aprilia stayed out of MotoGP for almost a decade, returning on her ART CRT motorcycle in 2012 and improving her game in 2015 with a motorcycle powered by an engine from her RSV4 superbike.
This first RS-GP was a laboratory motorcycle designed by Romano Albesiano who had defected to Ducati from Piaggio’s racing department (where he worked on Aprilias and Moto Guzzis!).
In 2016, the RS-GP was powered by a full prototype engine with pneumatic valves and seamless gearboxes, but Aprilia again decided to go their own way. While Ducati and Honda drove and won races with 90-degree V4s, Aprilia opted for a 75-degree V4.
A narrow-angled V has several advantages, most notably better packaging for the motorcycle. But like everything in racing, it’s a mix of positives and negatives. For example, a narrow V requires a balance shaft, which means more weight and space and less horsepower.
Finally, last year Aprilia did what it had never done before in the premier class: it went with the flow and built a 90-degree V4 with an overall motorcycle configuration not dissimilar to Ducati’s Desmosedici.
Suddenly the motorcycle was competitive, because in racing the best thing to do is forget the technical diversity and experimentation and instead copy the winner and try to improve his performance.
Aleix Espargaró qualified fourth for the bike’s third race and often showed high speed in races only to be disappointed by the tricky problems that inevitably suffer from a completely new bike. Not only that, but cost-saving technical emergency regulations written in the wake of Covid-19 prevented Aprilia from doing what it needed to do: introduce engine and aerodynamic upgrades during the season.
The RS-GP’s 2020 aero was a particular problem – it was designed for higher gear tracks that require less downforce – so the bike rolled way too much all year round, depriving it of acceleration.
Marco Melandri on the first RS-GP MotoGP motorcycle – with a street engine – during the 2015 pre-season tests
Aprilia
Last winter Aprilia fixed all of these issues and from the first race in 2021 Espargaró was spot on. In Losail and Jerez he finished five seconds behind the winner, only two tenths too slow from the pace of victory
At the Austrian GP, two weeks before Silverstone, it was five seconds behind and closed before the rain set in.
“When Aleix caught up with the first group in Spielberg, which is not a good track for us, I said we are ready,” said Albesiano after his first MotoGP podium on Sunday.
Espargaró, who had previously achieved a MotoGP top three at the rain-soaked Aragon GP in 2014 aboard an open-top Yamaha YZR-M1, was as relieved as everything else after chasing winner Fabio Quartararo and runner-up Álex Rins across the finish line.
“We were very, very close in the past races,” said the 32-year-old Spaniard, who is contesting his twelfth season in MotoGP and his fifth with Aprilia. “Finally being on the podium is something that gives me more motivation to keep working and improve the bike.