as the title says ... spy shots of the 09 GP bike have no trellis frame.  things seems to be shifting at the mothership.

http://hellforleathermagazine.com/2008/06/ducati-desmosedici-gp9-appears.html

Quotecarbon fiber monocoque

Mmmmm carbon fiber monocoque.  I'll take two.

George Harrison said it best "All things must Pass"  ..........................Maybe Ducati if they do away with the Trelis frame won't do it to their street nakeds . If they do it to a Faired bike it wouldn't be bad IMHO.

Quote from: DoubleEagle on June 09, 2008, 01:54:51 PM
George Harrison said it best "All things must Pass"  ..........................Maybe Ducati if they do away with the Trelis frame won't do it to their street nakeds . If they do it to a Faired bike it wouldn't be bad IMHO.

My guess is that we'll have Steel in our frames for a long time to come.   

The motoGP bikes are all prototypes, So what they do on the MotoGp Bikes does not mean we will see it on the road any time soon, if at all.

And if I remember correctly one of the Mags here in Australia a few months spoke to one of the Ducati Corse high ups and he hinted then that the GP9 was going to a C/F Frame/Monocoque.
Something about Flex could be controlled a lot better with the C/F setup, with simple mods to the frame they could control frame flex and set it better to suit each tracks requirements

Don't forget how much weight they'll drop from the steel to the CF frame...

But was weight an Issue on the GP8? I always thought they were close to the limit now.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. 

But, this would allow them to redistribute the weight lower if they could...

The problem with "tuning" a steel frame is that it isn't a simple process.  You have wall thickness, tube diameter and then the TIG welded joint itself (and HAZ) to take into consideration.  And a change is typically multi-directional. (when perhaps you one one direction only)  Perk is that it is a fairly easy frame to build.  Perk of CF for a frame material is that the layup in the mold can be changed to tune the flexibility of the chassis in one or many directions depending upon layup.  Definitely a more elaborate method for creating a frame -- but the perks are worth doing. (especially for racing and having multiple chassis)

And second consideration is being able to "duplicate" a frame.  A CF frame can be built in series that are all fairly identicial when it comes to rideability out of the mold.  It's why F1, IndyCar, etc are the way they are -- transfer suspension setups to another tub and you can literally race it without having to test.  Replicating a steel tubular chassis with the same jig, same stack of tubing, same welding people, etc -- you will never get a chassis that has the exact same ridability characteristics out of it.  Thus for Ducati if you swap the suspension / engine / etc into a new chassis, you still need to do tuning to make the package work.

The interesting question is if they did a typical spar type of construction or a true monocoque design of the chassis?  If it's the latter and it works -- watchout MotoGP world -- everyone will need to step up their game.  Team Roberts was doing a 100% CNC'd chassis with the last of the Honda V-5 engines and they were incredibly competitive.  Big perk was consistanty of ridability from bike-to-bike for them.

I like the implication here - where Ducati leads, the rest of the world follows.

"A timeframe for the unlikely trickle down to production bikes of this unconfirmed technology is nebulous at best, but this could indicate the next wave of development in MotoGP design."

Stoner tested the new GP9 yesterday at Catalunya, some pics of bike where you can see bits of frame
http://www.italiaspeed.com/

what did they say about my coque?

Quote from: 55Spy on June 10, 2008, 02:55:36 AM

what did they say about my coque?

lol... my thoughts exactly...

To quote Casey Stoner from the MotoGP Website After his ride on the GP9.....

´I´m happy with the way today has gone. The objective was to understand whether this new chassis concept has potential and I´d say that for now it looks to be the case. We were quickly into some decent times using the same set-up as the GP8. We barely changed anything to adapt it to the characteristics of the GP9 and I immediately felt an improvement so that is positive. I´m sure that with more time to work on it we can go much faster, although that is not the current brief. We´ll have time to test it in the winter. Tomorrow we´ll get back on my GP8 because we have some important tyre testing to do. There is still a lot of the 2008 season left and we want to be competitive.´

Official test day Times
It was a positive debut for the machine in the hands of the World Champion, so much so that the Australian set the best time of the day with a 1´41.533 on qualifying tyres.

The problem with carbon is that it is a "dead" material, it doesn't give the same feedback to the rider that steel does. But....no one at Ducati ever asks me anything