miloVanMultistrada
Webmonkey
Honda's new clutch / gearbox has been known about since the pre-season testing, but in an effort to work out how much of an advantage it gives them, the editor of motomatters was at Qatar and recorded the sound of the Yamaha, Ducati & Honda chaging gear. He has then attempted to analyze the resulting waveforms:
http://www.motomatters.com/analysis/2011/03/19/honda_s_magic_gearbox_worth_a_few_hundre.html
"Honda's seamless shift gearbox has been the talk of the MotoGP world since it first debuted at Sepang, with journalists on a quest to chase down exactly what it is and how it works. The only response you receive from HRC or Honda riders about the gearbox is that it is "better" and that it is "smoother". The best guess about its operation so far has been that it is either based on or very similar to the Xtrac Instantaneous Gearshift System, which allows two gears to be engaged simultaneously, while driving only one.
Since the introduction of the system, speculation has been rampant as to exactly how much advantage Honda's gearbox confers. Wild guesses were doing the rounds, with the highest guess being that it would give an advantage of 0.9 seconds a lap, an absolute eternity. According to one of the journalists over at GPOne.com, Filippo Preziosi said he believed that Honda's gearbox was probably worth around 0.2 seconds a lap.
In my adopted home of the Netherlands, they have a saying: "Meten is weten", to measure is to know. In that spirit, I went out to the side of the track during the test, and took a number of recordings of bikes exiting Turn 10 and shifting up the gears, going past and shifting up. On the basis of those sound recordings, I tried to estimate the length of the gearchange for each of the bikes that I had recorded.
The methodology was as follows: taking a couple of gearchanges from each sound file, I tried to identify the start and end for each gearchange. By looking at the length of the sound sample left, I estimated the duration of the sample, and therefore the gearchange. Here are the timings I found:
Bike Average shift time (ms)
Ducati 42
Yamaha 27
Honda 8"
How much is this worth per lap? It could be as high as 0.5 seconds, with the added advantage that the bike is more stable.
More at motomatters
http://www.motomatters.com/analysis/2011/03/19/honda_s_magic_gearbox_worth_a_few_hundre.html
"Honda's seamless shift gearbox has been the talk of the MotoGP world since it first debuted at Sepang, with journalists on a quest to chase down exactly what it is and how it works. The only response you receive from HRC or Honda riders about the gearbox is that it is "better" and that it is "smoother". The best guess about its operation so far has been that it is either based on or very similar to the Xtrac Instantaneous Gearshift System, which allows two gears to be engaged simultaneously, while driving only one.
Since the introduction of the system, speculation has been rampant as to exactly how much advantage Honda's gearbox confers. Wild guesses were doing the rounds, with the highest guess being that it would give an advantage of 0.9 seconds a lap, an absolute eternity. According to one of the journalists over at GPOne.com, Filippo Preziosi said he believed that Honda's gearbox was probably worth around 0.2 seconds a lap.
In my adopted home of the Netherlands, they have a saying: "Meten is weten", to measure is to know. In that spirit, I went out to the side of the track during the test, and took a number of recordings of bikes exiting Turn 10 and shifting up the gears, going past and shifting up. On the basis of those sound recordings, I tried to estimate the length of the gearchange for each of the bikes that I had recorded.
The methodology was as follows: taking a couple of gearchanges from each sound file, I tried to identify the start and end for each gearchange. By looking at the length of the sound sample left, I estimated the duration of the sample, and therefore the gearchange. Here are the timings I found:
Bike Average shift time (ms)
Ducati 42
Yamaha 27
Honda 8"
How much is this worth per lap? It could be as high as 0.5 seconds, with the added advantage that the bike is more stable.
More at motomatters
