According to Pit Beirer, MotoGP must be careful not to take a direction similar to that of F1, where the numerous engineers disrupt the hierarchy of the pilots.
With the obligation to respect a budgetary ceiling from next year to drastically limit costs, Formula 1 has decided to backtrack on its level of operation and stop the drifts of the race for performance that the cutting-edge teams. For this, the top teams will notably have to reduce their number of employees, and this is a situation that Pit Beirer absolutely wants to avoid in MotoGP in the future.
The sporting director of KTM ensures that there will be no need to get there in the Motorcycle World Championship, where he does not see the need to have a large number of employees, and especially engineers. MotoGP teams work with engineers dispatched to the race team on the circuits, but do not have remote engineers to analyze the data as F1 teams do, and the Austrian does not see why the situation would change.
“For our sport to remain viable in the future, we should not go in the direction of Formula 1 and have between 60 and 80 engineers at the factory who would bring data to the track”, warns Beirer in an interview with Crash.net. “Sure it would help, but I think it’s not necessary to do what we do. We want to ride a motorcycle on a circuit, we want to make the public happy with that. Why is the public watching MotoGP? To see our incredible pilots on these rockets. And they want to know who is the best pilot on this machine. “
“But I don’t think people will ever come to the track or watch TV to find out who the top 100 engineers are sitting in an office at the factory. I would cry for every euro spent if we went that way. I want to keep the spirit of competition exactly as it is, and when I say we miss competition, it’s the one on the circuit, not in an office. We want to be together on the circuits and if it’s not allowed to bring everyone on the circuit, those who are not allowed to cry, but the rest will make the show! “
Words that made Davide Tardozzi, team manager of the official Ducati team react. The Italian wants to be reassuring and assures GPOne that such a scenario is not even envisaged: “I read these statements, but I had never heard of this possibility. Honestly, I did not understand what he meant, no one has ever spoken of it officially and I would not know what To do a job like that of Formula 1, we would need telemetry that we don’t have, we only have data acquisition. They can do a certain type of job because they download the data in real time and they can act on the car; on a motorcycle, the situation is very different. “
Davide Brivio shared this point of view in an interview with Motorsport.com end of March. The Suzuki team manager concedes that MotoGP has been following this route for several years, but assures that F1 is at another stage of technological advancement. On the other hand, he praised the progress made by the teams in the field of engineering since the beginnings of MotoGP.
“We are getting close to it, but I believe that Formula 1 is still a bit far from the technological point of view, especially given the undoubtedly more important resources at their disposal”says Brivio. “Where we have three engineers, they have ten. Everything is much bigger in Formula 1 from that point of view, but I must say that the philosophy and the concept are equal, or at least there are is there a tendency to try to arrive at this concept. “
“A greater search for information and instruments to assemble, such as simulation. We are approaching it, but I believe that it is the fascinating and beautiful part of MotoGP, which can help a team that works well in terms of processing information to catch up from a technical point of view. That’s what MotoGP has changed in the last 15 years: it’s less simplistic, more developed from an engineering point of view. “
With Marco Congiu and Matteo Nugnes
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