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The 2021 MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship heads to its second new track in as many rounds. The majority of the Superbike class has tested at the Circuito de Navarra in Northern Spain, but it is an all-new challenge for a race weekend. The test will have put teams and riders into the ballpark for setup – they’ll fully understand their gearbox ratios and shift patterns for instance – but now they need to get the most out of their packages.

How important is data recording?

Data recording is the key to understanding your bike and making progress over the course of a race weekend. As ever in racing the devil is in the detail and the detail is provided by sensors all over the motorcycle. Each sensor will transmit information back to the team via the telemetry link-up and download every time a bike comes into the pits. When you see a team plug in a laptop to the bike it’s to download that data. 

That data comes from a wide array of sensors for all parts of the bike but the most important are wheel speed, suspension travel and the IMU (the inertial measure unit). The IMU is arguably the biggest advancement in electronics in recent years and was at the centre of MotoGP™ news in 2018 when Dorna regulated that it would be incorporated into the control electronics package. The reasoning behind this is that it’s an incredibly complex tool that measures six-axis of movement for a bike: up, down, left, right, forwards and backwards; it can be used to tailor very exact data for traction control strategies. 

Expert insight

“Teams are always ready for a race weekend,” explains Peter Bom. “They know exactly what to expect and have planned out their weekend in advance. They know what programme they’ll run from Free Practice 1 all the way through to Race 2. They arrive at a circuit with a base setting and on the first laps they’ll expect the rider to say certain things: “If the rider comes in from his first lap and says the bike is what they expect the team will move on to the next item in their list. If it’s a strange comment though it becomes very important to have a data guy that can quickly underline the comments of the riders or contradict them, by saying ‘It doesn’t look like that in the data,’ or ‘It looks a lot like that in the data.’ You always need to keep in mind that there is no line in the data recording called ‘confidence.’ There’s a lot of information.”

That information is broken down bit by bit over a season to fully develop a complete package. When teams talk about base settings they are constantly evolving. From chassis geometry to electronics strategies, they’re always looking for ways to make improvements but with so much data to sift through, the biggest steps can be made away from the circuit between race weekends. Riders live and breathe for their craft; we see them training and maximising their physical capabilities between races. Crew chiefs are the same as they look for a small step that can make a big difference on track. 

The work never stops

Between race weekends, you can dig a lot deeper in the data. At the track you are looking at the surface and comparing data for suspension, brake pressure and the easy parts to assess. Then you’ll start looking at data from a completely different point of view. You’re not looking at one lap, you're working on a lot more information. To do this, teams will look at the min/max values for sensors and start to clean up the data to give a fuller picture. That’s the high-end data recording and where it gets really interesting.

When data recording was first used in racing the key was to compare front and rear wheel speeds and use this to model traction control settings; finding a way to drive grip for the rider. Now, we’re using data recording to dive a lot deeper into the performance characteristics of every part of the motorcycle and really allow WorldSBK teams to maximise the package available to them.

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