![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768838647_324_image.png\")
<\/p>\nDucati technical director David Barana has revealed some of the secrets and improvements that the Italian manufacturer hopes will retain its MotoGP dominance in 2026 as the series prepares to end the current rule cycle.<\/p>\n
Speaking to The Race among a small group of journalists ahead of Monday\u2019s team launch in Italian ski resort Madonna di Campiglio, Barana and head of data analytics David Attisano laid out the priorities they\u2019ve been concentrating on in developing the GP26 machine after an unusual 2025 campaign in which Marc Marquez dominated but other Ducati riders, including his team-mate Pecco Bagnaia, struggled to come to terms with the bike.<\/p>\n
With vibration and stability problems throughout the latter half of the season that left Bagnaia in particular completely lost, Barana says that the team\u2019s 2026 goal is to address those issues while still trying to increase performance elsewhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur aim is to improve the bike to increase the gap,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd to do that, we worked on multiple fronts. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be a big mistake to think that your bike has a big problem and once you solve it, you gain a big advantage. The current MotoGP bikes are very complex, and it’s very unlikely that you find a big gap in a single area.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to improve the chassis. In the last season we collected a lot of complaints about vibration. Vibration has become more and more a matter because probably the increase of performance has pushed the tyres at their limit, and we see more and more vibration problems, chattering. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we’ll bring some new components in order to calm the behaviour of the bike. And not only vibration but also stability of the bike, in certain circuits, for example the fastest ones, like Phillip Island or Assen, we have suffered stability problems. <\/p>\n
\u201cNot only Ducati probably, it’s a characteristic of this type of circuit, but certainly it’s a point we have worked on.\u201d<\/p>\n
But while those complaints that they\u2019re trying to address may have been most vocally aired by Bagnaia, Barana is adamant that it\u2019s not specifically an issue of the two-time MotoGP champion but more something that they\u2019re keen to address for all of the Ducati line-up.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing honest,\u201d he said, \u201ccertainly Pecco complained – but not only Pecco, also Marc, and also the other Ducati riders. We have six riders on track, and for what I know also our competitors suffered a lot. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo… we know, for many years, vibration, chattering expired. But the last two years they came back. Probably because of the tyre, because of the improvement of performance – probably both.\u201d<\/p>\n
While engine development is frozen for 2026 as a cost-cutting measure ahead of the introduction of 850cc engines in 2027, Barana is also confident that there\u2019s room for improvement there, too, as Ducati uses its aerodynamics expertise not just to work on the bike\u2019s wings but also to collaborate with technical partner Lenovo and to use its computational power to redesign key components of the bike\u2019s air intake system.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe target was, first, increase straight performance,\u201d added Barana. \u201cAcceleration and top speed. Because this is the easiest and safest way to overtake. To do that, we worked on aerodynamics and we worked on engine performance. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou know that this year the engine development is frozen. But of course we can work on the three components that are not under the seal of the engine – for example, all the air intake system, the snorkel and the airbox, this component can affect a lot the performance of the bike, not only for the pure engine power but also for the efficiency, combustion stability, throttle response. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe worked a lot on improving this component – by simulation, CFD internal simulation, and also here thanks to the HPC [high-powered computing] solution we’ve been able to run a lot of shapes and geometries in order to finetune the solution and minimise the solutions that we [then] have to test on dyno.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s another novel way in which Ducati has been working with Lenovo behind the scenes as well – by building its very own internal version AI chat bot in order to better problem-solve issues with the bike over race weekends.<\/p>\n
Built as a natural language chat bot similar to commercial versions like ChatGPT, Microsoft\u2019s Copilot and X\u2019s Grok, but with Ducati\u2019s data and knowledge library used to educate it, the team its hoping that it\u2019s another weapon in its arsenal.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an idea that comes from the spread of chat bots and natural language interaction with technology,\u201d Attisano explained. \u201cWe tried to figure out what is the best solution for us, and realised that we can make a fusion between our expertise and technology. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe great advantage of this is that you can have something that is applied on our data, our records, our base knowledge. Natural language interaction is very user-friendly, and you can write to it and get an answer that can be a sentence, a graph, an image or a video, or an engineering record.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we would like to do is give to our engineers on track access to all the knowledge of Ducati to speed up their work when they have to give feedback or our technicians or our riders.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ducati technical director David Barana has revealed some of the secrets and improvements that the Italian manufacturer hopes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-423513","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}