Season Review: The winning RSV4 bike
From the very outset, parent company Piaggio Group got Aprilia Racing involved, so that the bike would be focused on racing, and the result was a machine which is very advanced and multi-adjustable.
The 65-degree V4 engine is small and dense but mainly incredibly narrow for a four cylinder, so right off Aprilia had an advantage in terms of ground clearance and aerodynamics.
In year one of its participation in WSBK, 2009, all the complicated home-brewed tech and extreme adjustability made for a lot of work for the technical staff and riders, as this new entry had no useable data to go on, and all that adjustability just made it as easy to miss the optimum setting as it did to help find them.
This year the 2009 data was invaluable in getting a good set-up at each round, allowing Biaggi to concentrate more on race set-up from the first session of practice.
The published claim of a top power figure around 215bhp at 15,000 rpm this year seemed conservative, as others claim more than 220bhp, and the Aprilia was at least as fast as its rivals in 2010. Aprilia designed and refined their own EFI system, and also used gyroscopes to provide inputs of the machine's attitude in all planes of movement. Traction control and anti-wheelie were particular areas of interest in 2010.
Aprilia used Öhlins suspension, like most of the factory teams, 42mm TRVP25 front forks and RSP40 (TTX40) rear shocks, which were claimed to be a real advance.
There are a bundle of reasons why Max Biaggi won the title this year on his small and sharp Aprilia, but the fact that Biaggi could match his exact demands for any particular set-up change to suit changing circuits or track conditions was a real key to his overall success.
