2013 Silly Season?...maybe spoilers

[zooom]

And furthermore, replace Preziosi with whom?
 

I hear Davide Tardozzi is currently available....

[ducpainter]

I hear Davide Tardozzi is currently available....

He's a team manager...

not a development engineer.

I have to agree with Nick...

[Raux]

And furthermore, replace Preziosi with whom?
The world-dominating MotoGP engineering department of Audi?  

How about raiding BMW's team both of Manager and designers 

[duccarlos]

How long has BMW been building superbikes? How long has Ducati? I think that from day 1 of building a superbike with no prior experience to leading a championship in 5 years in mighty impressive.

I'm not saying that Audi is going to send their car engineers to simply redesign a bike. That would be idiotic. What you do is steal the guys that obviously have the s1000rr working in SBK. You already tried to bring in one of Japan's top bike engineers, how'd that work out for you?

[ducpainter]

How long has BMW been building superbikes? How long has Ducati? I think that from day 1 of building a superbike with no prior experience to leading a championship in 5 years in mighty impressive.

I'm not saying that Audi is going to send their car engineers to simply redesign a bike. That would be idiotic. What you do is steal the guys that obviously have the s1000rr working in SBK. You already tried to bring in one of Japan's top bike engineers, how'd that work out for you?

Gee...

maybe they build a Ducati I4.

[derby]

How long has BMW been building superbikes? How long has Ducati? I think that from day 1 of building a superbike with no prior experience to leading a championship in 5 years in mighty impressive.

reg pridmore won the ama superbike championship on a bmw r90s in 1976. do we need to go further back than that? 

[duccarlos]

Or a Ducati V4, oh wait...

[Raux]

well i would say development focus would be on chassis and motor/chassis interaction.
the motor is still the most powerful, but expect that to change with the new ecu/rev limit

the more i think about GP the more I hate Dorna.

fricking let a company design a true prototype.
the 81mm bore limit/ecu/rev limit/tires

anyway... off topic...

Preziosi said a while ago he would have prefered a 2 cyl. that says he's already out of his element.
add this new move to the perimeter frame, the previous carbon 'frameless' etc etc.

like i said before Preziosi was a genius taking other designer's/engineer's bikes and taking them to another level.
so maybe it takes another lead designer AND another team manager come in, build a genius bike and IF Preziosi lets his pride move aside, he can assist in the development.

[duccarlos]

reg pridmore won the ama superbike championship on a bmw r90s in 1976. do we need to go further back than that? 

You just had to come in here and ruin my perfectly good argument with your "facts".

[Raux]

reg pridmore won the ama superbike championship on a bmw r90s in 1976. do we need to go further back than that? 

what the hell is your last name? Google?

[triangleforge]

You just had to come in here and ruin my perfectly good argument with your "facts".

One of my favorite stories was Pridmore talking about that bike later, noting that they kept telling the folks back in Germany that there were issues, most notably with the brakes.

The consistent response: The brakes are fine. We designed them, so they cannot be otherwise.

I don't thing Pridmore was being (too) cocky when he said that championship was about the rider, not so much the bike.

A friend of mine who's the lead BMW mechanic at one of the largest dealerships in SoCal confirms that the attitude of the home office hasn't changed much in the intervening decades, at least when it comes to engineering questions.

[duccarlos]

Well, I guess they realized how bad it was eventually or they redesigned them to actually work and said "I told you so".

[triangleforge]

Actually, they just got used to not having much in the way of brakes from about the halfway point in the race onward. Pridmore was on a Kawi the following year. He won the championship on that, too.

(sorry for the digression into Silly Season '76. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Silly.)

[fastwin]

reg pridmore won the ama superbike championship on a bmw r90s in 1976. do we need to go further back than that? 

That team was run by the importers of the day... Butler and Smith. Good times back then! The AMA SBK paddock was the center of the universe when it came to "bending" the rules and putting your own spin on the rulebook. Made NASCAR look like Mother Teresa.

[Speeddog]

How about raiding BMW's team both of Manager and designers 

If they had done something more original, rather than basically copying the other I4 superbikes, I might see a glimmer of hope in that.

But they didn't.