New Ducati MotoGP, how the team’s virtual data processing works

“The faster you analyze the data available, the faster you can get on the track”. The sentence comes from Cristian Gabarrini, Pecco Bagnaia’s track engineer, during the presentation of the new Ducati MotoGP 2022. But Luca Rossi immediately promotes it: “It’s a great synthesis of our work”. Who Luca Rossi is and what job he refers to is quickly clarified: he is the global vice president of Lenovo, a multinational IT / electronics company with 60 billion dollars and 180 distribution countries. Above all, it is the company that has been helping Ducati improve its performance in MotoGP since 2018 through the intelligent and creative analysis of the data collected during the activity of the Desmosedici of Bagnaia and Miller. Because racing remains a matter of instinct and fur on the stomach, of defying one’s limits, but also of the ability to interpret what wonderful objects built by man, motorcycles, say.

President, why should a top MotoGP team turn to a top computer team?
“In very broad terms, to modernize the use of a number of new technologies that can be of considerable help in the factory and on the track”.

In more specific terms?
“A large company like Ducati turns to a large company like Lenovo not only for daily business, but above all to accelerate digital transformation to the maximum, especially in the Covid era when Ducati’s remote garage was developed. Competitiveness on the track is not an isolated factor, it is a business process. We help structure part of that process. By optimizing the over 50 electronic sensors present on a motorcycle such as the Desmosedici, organizing the servers for data storage and protection, creating data processing systems, developing artificial intelligence that allows for a better and faster interpretation of the amount of Collected data. But let’s be clear, the rider makes the race, the rider and the bike win the race, we help the team to make as few mistakes as possible and maximize the strengths of the bike, the Desmosedici in this case “.

There is talk of 50 sensors on the bike, and an indefinite amount of data. What quantities are we talking about?
“Billions of data. To give an idea: in a MotoGP race – I stress, a single race of about 45 minutes – the sensors on a motorcycle collect about 15 GB of data, the equivalent of what an average user collects in his mailbox in 10 years. If you add the test data and expand the field to an entire season … ”.

And then in the Covid era, the virtual garages you mentioned earlier have developed a lot. What is their value for a racing department?
“Of course, Lenovo created the structure of the Ducati Virtual Garage. You can intervene in real time on every aspect, as if you were in attendance. A Ducati mechanic in Sepang, for example, and a Ducati engineer in Borgo Panigale can share real-time data, telemetry and a whole range of aspects, instantly. In this way the engineer can understand what the problem is on the bike and solve it, or have it solved by whoever gets their hands on the bike “.

Without Covid, would we still have virtual garages today?
“Covid has been a time machine, it has given the decisive acceleration to a process already underway. Without Covid we would have talked about it around 2025, but remote garages have been a reality for a couple of years “.

Let’s reverse the points of view: why does an IT giant have an interest in collaborating with a racing giant?
“Because digital transformation and the return effect of applying our technologies have a beneficial effect on a company like Lenovo. We have grown, passing from PCs only to the production of phones, we not only deal with the hardware but we develop our know-how, thanks to collaborations such as the one with Ducati, but I could also add Inter when talking about football, we have become a company from solution providing. Collaboration and application give us opportunities to broaden our field of action “.

But in this, let’s call it “sport”, data reading, is there room for human creativity?
“Space? Human creativity is fundamental. Machines process data and suggest procedures according to horizons that man has given to the machine, to the computer. The human being gives the direction. And I add: the human being reads the data and the ability to find different data where everything seems identical is the great creative phase. With the same data available, and today in MotoGP all the big teams have it at their disposal, the difference is given by the ability to read and apply them. As the engineer Gabarrini said “.

When motorsport started this metamorphosis: instinct ok but do we use data and ask for help from computers?
“I would say with the X86 processors, there has been a huge IT breakthrough. Let’s say in the period between the late 1980s and early 2000s. The childhood of the big datato be clear, but always keeping the rider at the center of everything “.

Here, the pilots. In F1 the great drivers are now “learning the language” of the engineers. Where are we in MotoGP?
“In my experience, the profile of the motorcycle rider at the highest level remains that of a superman in physical terms, human beings more gifted than others to withstand high speeds and the stresses in general of engineering objects of an unimaginable level up to a few years ago. Even today in motorcycles the physical aspect has not been lost. What changed was the perception of the drivers: they understood that trying to understand the language of the engineers helps performance. Of course, society in general has influenced this evolution of pilots, we are talking about digital natives, who have greater mental flexibility in the way they deal with digital tools. There is a greater propensity to want to understand ”.

Finally, the crystal ball question. What can we expect from artificial intelligence applied to the racing world in the next … 10 years?
“If I have to mention one aspect, I believe that a large investment will be made in applied virtual reality. I’m not just talking about the efficiency of the simulators, which are already very performing today. Virtual reality will be more and more mature and this will result in the opportunity to practice on the bike but above all in the opportunity to collect real data through virtual processing. And, to quote Gabarrini, the more powerful and faster I am with the data, the faster I can go on the track ”.