How can we make sense out of Ducati’s recent decision to go “Open,” to leave the ranks of prototypes to embrace the advantages and compromises of the formerly CRT (Claiming Rule Team) category in MotoGP?
When it entered MotoGP in 2003, Ducati upset the unspoken Japanese “gentlemen’s agreement” enunciated by former HRC President Yasuo Ikenoya that participating factories would foreswear “exotic technologies” such as pneumatic valve springs and extreme Formula 1-like bore/stroke ratios, and not field equipment requiring service more complex than what was usual in World Superbike. Although never written into rules, this concept essentially spelled out a non-production-based racing class of modest technological level.
The only valve-control technology Ducati was familiar with was desmodromic, in which the valves are opened normally by cams and finger followers but are closed not by springs but directly by complementary cam lobes operating L-shaped closing levers. This system provided a potential rpm advantage.
Ducati’s new bike wasted no time getting on the podium, giving Honda’s “gentlemen” a bad scare. They responded somewhat intemperately, privately calling Ducati “pirates,” implying that Ducati had used illegal means (desmo) to obtain what was not rightfully theirs (podium positions).