New MotoGP fairings 'could be used in road machines'

It's a 'side-effect', but the MotoGP rules banning external winglets has steered aerodynamic development into a street-legal direction.

While the former wings would clearly have been illegal for production machines, at least some of the new fairings could pass the necessary road regulations.

Such production use would in turn mean the appearance of 'winglet' fairings in Superbike racing.

"What [the MotoGP manufacturers] are doing now, or what I expect they will be doing, is much more road relevant than horrible wings. This is a good by-product of the new regulations," MotoGP Director of Technology Corrado Cecchinelli told Crash.net.

"These fairings could be used in a high-end road machine, but not the wings. Anyway, this was not the goal, but nonetheless it is a useful side-effect."

Alongside the ban on external winglets is a new limit on aerodynamic development, restricting all but new manufacturers to only one update during the season.

"I think we have found a reasonable compromise, because we had to put a limit on two main things: One, a crazy cost and investment in aerodynamics. Two, safety raised by the Safety Commission, which means the riders, which was passed onto us by the FIM," Cecchinelli said.

"We had to try and hit both targets and I think we hit the cost by reducing the amount of evolution you can do, which is basically one-per-year for everyone but KTM, as a new manufacturer. And we introduced a better wording and a lot of discretion for the Technical Director to decide if something is compliant [with the ban on external wings] and safe or not.

"I think this is a good compromise, which doesn't mean you cannot design your fairing to have downforce. Because that is against the spirit of racing in a prototype series. So you can do whatever you want, but not so often and not with protruding and dangerous bodywork. This is the compromise.

"It is not correct to say people should not design their fairing to have an aerodynamic effect, because this is the job of the fairing. That is not what we wanted. I'm saying that because sometimes we have critics that are against everything and they say; 'you ban the wings but still they have downforce using different things'.

"Okay, but we didn't ban downforce! We have nothing against aerodynamics, we have something against too much money being spent and something against it being dangerous."

CLICK HERE to read the full exclusive interview with Corrado Cecchinelli..