KTM problems
Notes from Trackside
Having been out trackside during FP1, to see the bike in the flesh, it was surprising to see Kallio finish so far down the timesheets. For part of FP1, Kallio was caught in the middle of a pack of six or seven riders, and managed to hold his own.
Watching from Turn 12, where you can see the bike braking in a straight line, turn in for the right hander and then being flicked hard left for the start of the endless and glorious Turn 13, the
KTM RC16 looked pretty good.
It was stable in braking, and turned in well for Turn 12, though it was obvious Kallio was having to use a lot of force to get the bike back over for Turn 13. Whether that was the bike or Kallio, however, it was hard to say.
I then moved to Turn 13 and round to the entrance to Turn 14, watching the bikes as they stream down the hillside, heeled hard over and the rear stepped out.
The KTM looked solid through Turn 13, though it would occasionally show a spot of blue smoke from the rear tire, a sign it was being worked too hard. That smoke had been spotted by Bradley Smith, who is due to take his place on the bike on Tuesday morning.
It meant the rear was spinning up too much under acceleration, he explained.
Rear Grip vs. Wheelspin
That was exactly what Mika Kallio complained of when he spoke to us on Friday afternoon. “For some reason there was no grip with the rear tires. Even if we changed different settings, and the soft and the hard on the rear, I always faced the same problems,” Kallio said.
“It was spinning and basically I lose the contact of the rear going into the corner. It never comes back so we lost a lot of time there. I started to lose the grip at the point when I was flicking into the corner. Then when I was picking up the bike I lost too much time there.”
The lack of rear grip had come as something as a surprise to Kallio, after he had been eight tenths quicker at a test here back in October. “We were here one month ago and we were faster,” he said.
“That’s why we were expecting more. We are not too far from the temperature when we tested. In the afternoon we realized that it was the same. I think there is something else at the moment.”
One sign of the problems KTM was having was the fact that Kallio’s top speed was well below what was expected. Kallio was third slowest in top speed along the straight, clocking around 312 km/h, or 10 km/h slower than Andrea Iannone on the Ducati.
As the engine is not short of horsepower, the low top speed was being caused by a lack of acceleration, rather than anything else.
Stop Spinning
That issue had taken KTM rather by surprise, but this is basically the difference between testing and racing. Paul Trevathan, crew chief to Kallio and from Tuesday, for Pol Espargaro, explained they hadn’t been expecting this to be a problem, as it had never been an issue they had been concerned with during testing.
“It’s clear from when you start riding with the other guys, that it wasn’t a point that we were so aware of,” the New Zealander said.
The issue was not one of electronics, Trevathan said, but rather one of basic chassis design and geometry. “It’s not actually the electronics side, it’s more mechanical, and we have to figure out a way of getting around that in a short period of time,” he said.
“Mechanical grip, the feeling from us and him is that it’s this, so we have to try to fix this. How to load the tire in a different way and try to understand it. But again, it’s something that we hadn’t realized that it was a problem. We’ve been fine when we’re by ourselves.”
Good Engine, Good Braking, & Now the Details
There were also plenty of positives to be taken from the day, both Kallio and Trevathan insisted. The engine character was good, and it produced plenty of horsepower.
Having an engine with a manageable power delivery also meant less work for the electronics, Trevathan said. But KTM still had work to do, to help the bike turn in a little better.
The difficulty Kallio had been having flicking the bike from right to left had not been entirely down to Kallio’s size, the Finnish rider one of the smaller, lighter riders on the grid.
“There comes a point that there is a limit of what a rider can do by leverage. And the bikes are heavy. They’re not as light as people like to think,” Trevathan said.
“I think it’s still a point we have to work on, it’s not the strong point of the bike, absolutely, so we have to find ways around it. But when you’re smaller, these things are difficult, especially at high speed.”
Kallio ended the day three seconds off the pace, and eight tenths slower than he had been during the test a month previously. He had expected to be two seconds slower than the fastest riders, as he had been at the test in Austria.
“OK, it’s a completely different track, but I think this is the minimum that we need to do,” Kallio said. “We need to improve one second to be close to the others.” Qualifying on Saturday could be a bit of a problem, but race pace should be much closer.
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