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James Whitham: Solving the Bautista escapology problem...

As I left the Aragon paddock after round three of the WorldSBK Championship, most of the talk centred around what’s going to happen in the first of the three planned performance re-balancing calculation that are to take place during the 2019 season.

Now, I personally don’t even know what an algorithm is, but apparently FIM technical director Scott Smart uses one to work out which of the faster bikes on the grid might get their performance trimmed slightly (probably by lowering the allowed rev limit) and which of the under achievers might get a leg-up by raising theirs or being given access to concession parts – essentially, make the fast bikes slower and the slow ones faster.

Sounds easy, huh? Well, not really. It simply isn’t fair to penalise a rider for being faster than any other, so Smarty (with the help of the aforementioned algorithm) has to try to isolate the performance of the bike from the performance of the rider, and work out which is making the biggest difference to performance. Ooh, my head is hurting already.

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I came up with a more basic calculation. If you analyse Bautista’s sector times, figure out on average how much he gained on the straight bits of the Aragon track and multiply that by the number of laps in the race you’d end up with a time of a few seconds (around 8 I rekon).

What you have to then decide is, did he win by more than that time? In other words, did he win by more than the time the speed of the bike gave him?

If you think he did then you’d have to assume he’d have won anyway and a big chunk of the credit has to go to the rider. I think he did. And you don’t need a computer to work out that docking 250rpm from a bike that revs to over 16,000 won’t make much difference.

The race for second place at Aragon, particularly in the two feature races was superb. Containing a cast of Rea, Davies, Lowes, Haslam and Laverty with occasional cameo performances from Sykes, Torres and Van der Mark. And the bikes looked pretty equal over a lap too.

The Kawasakis of Rea and Haslam looked good, particularly on the early part of the lap, Lowes’ Yamaha looked nimble on the direction changes, the Ducatis of Davies and Laverty looked sharp in terms of top speed but not ridiculously so and Sykes’ BMW looked pretty sweet everywhere except the straights, and you have to think the German engineers will be able to rectify that given a bit of time.

We’ve had riders that have dominated their respective championships before. Foggy, Hodgson, Spies, Doohan, Spencer, Marquez and Rea, for the last four years in WorldSBK, to name but a few.

The racing at Aragon, albeit for second place, was some of the best we’ve seen in years. If you took Bautista out of the current equation and that huge dice last Sunday had been for the win we’d all be saying what a finely balanced affair it was and what a good job of preparing a level playing field the organisers had done.

Scott Smart is a pleasant and savvy bloke indeed, but I can’t help thinking that whatever his algorithm comes up with he’s gonna upset somebody.

Finally, what about wings? Well, they’re the things that are about six or seven inches long, and stick out of the front of the Ducati, one each side, and are designed to keep the front end down under acceleration. It’s like an aeroplane wing working upside-down.

It seems to work and be a definite advantage as has been proven in MotoGP (where they are now limited to certain dimensions). But should they be allowed on what are supposed to be production-based bikes?

WorldSBK is a ‘silhouette class’ which means that whatever the shape of the homologated road bike is, in silhouette form, from every angle, the race bike has to be. So if the road bike has some little winglets, which the new Ducati V4R has, then the race bike has to have them. So there!

British Superbikes kicks off at Silverstone in a couple of weeks and it’s the most difficult to call ever I reckon. I was asked for my Showdown prediction the other day and struggled. Maybe I should ask Scott if I can borrow his algorithm thing when he’s finished with it.

There’s probably ten or 11 riders with a genuine shot at ending up in the top six come the end of the main season. Will Scott Redding do a Bautista on the PBM V4R? Well, he’s carrying a bit more weight, but he has wings.

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