Repsol Honda's Dani Pedrosa and Yamaha Factory Racing's Jorge Lorenzo (Photo: Yamaha Racing)

What Does It All Mean?

The MSMA have accepted the ECU hardware but not the software, meaning that MSMA works teams will be free to write their own software programs, and that, as far as all the rider aids that Dorna sought to limit or eliminate, nothing important will change.

Factory bikes will give up an additional liter for fuel, reducing their maximum load to 20 liters. This will require a top-end redesign and lots of work for the programmers as they set about to lean the mix and avoid all excesses. Don’t expect to see any burnouts after wins. Wheelies have already gone the way of the plug-chop. And don’t expect to see these bikes sideways and smoking the tire either -- spinning up is wasteful.

Saying that this emphasis on fuel consumption will contribute to a greener planet is marketing talk without much substance since direct injection, useful in the real world, is impossible in MotoGP due to the fuel pressure limits already in place. Work on fuel consumption will be done on engines running freakishly high revs and of little or no relevance to any street engines. (Honda likes the challenge the same way Br'er Rabbit likes the briar patch.)

The reduction from six engines to five, for what was to have been a 19-race season before the Argentine GP was dropped, will not be a major problem as long as teams can avoid losing engines due to crashes (as happened to Jorge Lorenzo this year at Assen). All three manufacturers completed this year’s 18-race schedule without having to uncork a seventh engine and, as a consequence, having to suffer the ignominy of starting from pit lane.

By limiting themselves to less fuel and less engines, the MSMA have dodged the twin bullets of a rev limit and obligatory use of the pre-defined electronic strategies of a control ECU.

Clearly, unless they start running out of gas on the final lap (like Crutchlow on the Tech3 Yamaha in Motegi), nothing in the above will really slow the factory bikes down much and, therefore, the gap between the prototypes and the CRTs will not decrease unless a CRT team with big budget and very talented engineers decides to throw a lot of time and money at taking advantage of the extra 1.05669 gallon and the seven extra engines (or rebuilds).

Ask Richard Stanboli how much he thinks it would cost to do that. The Attack Performance Kawasaki-powered CRT, unlike most of the CRT field, used a team-designed chassis and an engine built also in house. But with no rev-limit placed on the factory prototypes, trying to match the performance of a factory Honda, Yamaha, or Ducati with a hot-rod Superbike engine would be stunningly expensive and maybe even impossible. And, as Kenny Roberts learned, building your own GP engine is quixotic, although I recall Kenny using a more down-to-earth term to describe the futility of it.

“Other Bikes”

So it seems that the whole CRT experiment merely served (and serves for one more year) to fill out the grid. We have mostly forgotten even what CRT stands for (claiming rule teams) since the original idea of allowing CRT teams to buy engines off other CRT teams was diverted and became something that was never intended. As it stands the only entities allowed to make a “claim” of a CRT engine (for 20,000 Euros) are the factory teams.

The universe of CRT teams was led by the two ARTs bought from Aprilia by the Jorge Martinez “Aspar” team and ridden to first and second in this subdivision by Aleix Espargaró and Randy de Puniet. Both of these ARTs were built completely by Aprilia and would have to be considered “production racers” or “over-the-counter” racers.

For 2013, bikes other than MSMA factory bikes will be given (as in free) and obliged to use a standard ECU from Magneti Marelli complete with basic package of electronic strategies (traction control, anti-wheelie, anti-jerk, launch control).

Twelve engines are allowed. The valve spring engines (and all CRT engines have been springers to far) need frequent top-end maintenance and their production-quality crankcases need periodic replacement, so the dozen engines or rebuilds that they are allowed will, again as in 2012, allow these private teams to avoid penalties, but it will do nothing to close the gap that separates the best CRTs from the last of the satellite prototypes.