bottpower

I started working in motorbike racing as telemetric in the CEV, in Kawasaki D’Antin team, in 2007 season. I met there Jose Luis Contreras, he was the “real” telemetric of the team (he was combining the CEV with MotoGP in Ducati Pramac Team). He teached me how to manage telemetry and electronic engine management.

I think that from the first day we had a good connection. We both love motorcycle races and technology, and we both try to approach our projects in a scientific way (within our means).
I think we both are very humble regarding what we think we know. I mean, we are very aware that our knowledge is very limited and that we have almost everything to learn.
Finally we both had one more thing in common. We dedicated most of our free time and money to personal motorbike projects approached with the intention of learning and increase our know-how. In that time I was working in the Morlaco and Jose was developing an electronic device that would allow him to generate his own motorbike control strategies (for example traction control, drive by wire, launch control, inteligent fuel compsuption control, etc).

During 2008 our paths split up, Jose abandoned the CEV to concentrate in MotoGP and I moved to Kawasaki Palmeto team. But we kept in contact and we kept informing each other about our projects.

Some months ago, when I explained Jose that I quit from my mechanical engineer job to concentrate in Bottpower and the Moto2 project, we thought about the possibility of become partners. He is more interested in engines and electronics and I am more interested in chassis, so we thought that we could make a good team. During the last months the idea was thinked over and finally we decided to do it. So now Bottpower core is formed by Jose and me, and we work together with a common objective, we want Bottpower to be a competitive racing brand.

In the Moto2 bike that we are building now, we already will see the first fruits of Jose’s work with electronics. You know that nowadays electronics has become in a fundamental part of racing motorbikes. If you want to be competitive you need a top noth electronics package. We will have our own technology, that will allow us to develop our own ideas at a reasonable cost.

I will talk about it with more detail in the next post.

Anima designers continue working and here we have the third evolution of the design. We have defined the tail and the nose of the bike.

From now on it is necessary to work in 3D. Here you have some proposals for the nose of the bike.

And here several proposals for the tail.

As always you will find the images in bigger size in our Flickr gallery.

The bodywork is beeing designed by Anima, a design studio from Barcelona.

You can see their first 5 proposals in our Flickr gallery (sketches A, B, C, D, E).

Here we have the second evolution of the design, these ones have a more racing feeling. Compared with the previous ones, air exits are smaller and surfaces are smoother.

The designs we are working on follow current design trend, more worried about turns than top speed in straight line.

Our intention is to create a design as effective as possible and later on try to make it look nice. But efficiency is our first goal. When I talk about efficiency I don’t mean top speed, I mean try to reduce lap times.

Please let me know your opinion about these designs.

This is proposal A1:

Proposal A2:

Proposal B1:

Proposal B2:

Proposal C:

As always, you can see the sketches with bigger size in our Flickr gallery.

This is the first prototype of the Moto2 fueltank, made in aluminium. As you can see in the photo, it hasn’t been welded yet, with the intention of checking that it fits properly in the bike, before welding it.

I designed it trying to make it very narrow, in that way the rider can close a little bit more his legs, making possible to reduce a little bit the front area of the bike in order to make it more aerodynamic. I also tried to make a “low” fueltank, in this way the rider can lie down over it in a more comfortable way, again with the intention of improving the aerodynamics.

In order to try to make a lower and narrower fueltank I used the Honda CBR one as a reference.

Like you know one of our technical sponsors is Incomet, a company that provides us with scanning service. Taking the most of it I asked them to scan the Honda fueltank. This is how it looks the mesh that you obtain from the point cloud that is gererated in the scanning process.

And this is how it looks once you convert the mesh into surfaces. This work could have been done in a much more precise way, but it’s not worth doing it because as I said I only wanted it as a reference to design the Moto2 fueltank.

Finally here you can see the final design of the fueltank. As it happens with the original one, this fueltank is covered by a fiber carcass. In following evolutions of the bike it is probable that we will make a “seen” (not covered) fueltank, eliminating the carcass and taking more profit of the available room.

Because the fueltak is narrower and lower than the Honda CBR one, part of the fuel has gone under the rider seat.
The cut that you can see in the lower area of the fueltank has been made to let room for the electrical loom.

Stay tuned! We will keep informing..  :-)

Today has been an important day in our Moto2 project. We assembled for the first time the engine into the first chassis unit that we built last week. I was a little worried thinking if everything would fit correctly.
I have checked 1000 times the cAD design and theorically we shouldn’t have any problem, but sometimes you can not be 100% sure till you don’t check it physically.

Fortunately everything went as it was planned. The engine fits perfectly in the chassis.
Here you have the first photo of our chassis. What can I say.. I am happy!    :-D

During the last weeks we had a lot of activity. The chassis welding was programmed for December but several delays in the parts manufacturing has delayed it to January. We start beeing with up to our neck to have the bike ready on time. Next months are going to be really “funny”…

As you can see we made some progress with the bike design. The CAD model now has fueltank and a swingarm. We are doing the design, fabrication and developing of the swingarm in collaboration with a South African company called CRP (you can see their logo in the sponsors area).

From a mechanical design point of view, I do not feel comfortable with the electronis location (battery, ECU, telemetry box) in the tail area. It should be closer to the center of gravity of the bike. Fortunately those 3 components are ultralight, so its location is not so critical to minimize the moments of inertia of the bike. From a practical point of view, taking into account the electronics wiring routing and the mechanical accesibility (I’m not talking about accesibility to the electronics, I mean to the rest of the bike), this is a good place.

The CAD model is far from beeing complete. We still must add a lot of details (in which we are working right now) like the radiator clamping, the exhaust system, airbox intake, display, bodywork, etc.

I don’t like to start the fabrication till the CAD model is 100% finished till it has the last screw on it, but in this case, taking into account how fast we must work (we started the design with Honda engine in September), we had to overlap the design process with the fabrication process.

In next picture you can see the parts of the chassis located in the swingarm axle housing. These are made out of steel, cnc machined. That “oval” hollow allows to adjust the swingarm axle location.

Right now we are fabricating 2 complete bikes. During last weeks I received several emails asking about the possibility of buying a Bott M210 to race in 2010. At this moment we don’t plan to sell any bike in 2010. Our Moto2 project is planned from a technical and sports point of view, and not so much from a commercial point of view. Our objective for 2010 is to have fun, continue learning and developing our bike.

Going back to the motorbike design subject, right now we are working in the airbox intake design. we are doing it with a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) parametric model. This model “plays” with several variables, in such way that after doing several calculations for each design possibility, the model tells us which is the best design. Of course the final resoult will depend on how good is our model.

As always, you can see bigger images in our Flickr gallery.

We will keep informing!    :-)

After several months working on a virtual project (till now everything are zeros and ones, drawings and calculations that exist only in a hard disk) I already was up to start touching something more solid.
First step has been to buy a brand new Honda CBR 600, and without even starting the engine, disassemble it to take the parts we are going to use in our Moto2, mainly the engine and the airbox.
This is how the bike looked at the beginning:

And here it is two hours later.

During the following weeks, once we start the Moto2 construction, everything will go faster.

After a lot of working hours, finally I have a more or less defined chassis. It took me quite time to arrive to a design with which I felt satisfied.

One of the particularities of this chassis is that he headstock is “stemless” type, this means it doesn’t have a steering axle that crosses it. In this way it is possible to improve a little bit the air flow that goes into the airbox.
In a competition in which all the engines are going to be the same, it seems interesting to try to achieve some small advantage in two areas that are directly related to the engine performance, one is air intake and the other one gasses exhaust.

If we look at the Moto2 bikes that have appeared till now, the FTR uses a stemless headstock and it is very probable that the Tech3 bike also uses it. It is not a new idea, some years ago bikes like the 95Racer and the Roadson (before known as Tucson) Superleggera BT 550 started using this solution.
Like you see the chassis is a trellis, it doesn’t have any bent tube, all are straight ones. There are some tubes that could be bent ones, but I prefer to use straight tubes, in this way I can work with high strength alloys that do not allow bending. Regarding the tubes I am very satisfied because one of the technical sponsors of the project is Reynolds, a world leader fabricator of high performance steel tubes.

The parts that are located in the swingarm pivot area are made out of CNC machined steel.
The chassis is very low in the rear area. For the rear suspension I used the same linkage system that Yamaha is using in their Motogp and WSBK bikes. With this design I located the shock lower than in what is usual in most of twin spar chassis motorbikes. I tried to move the chassis and shock downwards in order to be able to locate the fuel as close as possible to the engine. In principle I don’t want to extend the fueltank a lot to the rear as it seems is the current trend in almost all Moto2 bikes we have seen till now.

I will keep informing about the project development..  :-)

Last weekend we had in Montmeló the 5th round of the CEV 2009. Once again it was a very good weekend for the Kawasaki Palmeto team because Kenny Noyes won the race in the Formula Extreme category, in a vibrant race, riding first and controlling his rivals through the pit-board.

Congratulations Kenny!   :)

Kenny Noyes celebrates his victory in Montmeló.

Regarding Moto2 bikes, in Barcelona we had some news, the most important was the presence of a new machine, the long-awaited FTR of Joey Darcey team. Friday afternoon, I went with Pablo de Chaves (he also came to Montmeló) to the Joey Darcey box to watch the bike. It has a high finish and design quality, with a lot of small clever details, like the conduit that goes from the bodywork nose to the airbox, made out of aluminium, or the air exits for the radiator, very small and designed to minimize aerodynamic drag. With the same idea we can see how the keel arrives very far to the rear, connecting with the swingarm surface.

The design has a great deal of care regarding aesthetics, for example take a look at the way the footrests are clamped to the chassis (you will see it better in the Flickr photos), ot the support points for the bike stand (in the inner face of the swingarm). By the moment the FTR is the only one Moto2 bike that has the exhaust exit in the left side of the bike. The bike components (rims, brakes and suspensions) are top level.
In resume, a really nice bike. The Joey Darcey team has a lot of experience with Honda engines, and in the next 2 CEV rounds (in Jerez and Valencia) Graeme Gowland will be the rider, he already won the 2007 SS championship with the Joey Darcey team.

In Montmeló we also saw a new Moto2 prototype, the SR7 presented by Santolaya Racing. The bike was showed in the paddock, in the hospitality of the TMR team. The bike has an aluminum twinspar, with the air intake going through the steering head. By the moment it has an R6 swingarm.

Saturday afternoon we had a photo session with all the Moto2 and we went there to take some pictures. Unfortunately the AJR prototype wasn’t there because it burned in a crash during Saturday Q2 training.

Regarding the BQR bikes, Aoyama’s Moto2 (number 64) already had the airbox conduit we already talked about a couple of weeks ago, while Dani Riva’s bike (number 7) didn’t use it.

Aoyama's bike had a new airbox conduit.

YM2 LaGlisse’s Moto2 raced in Montmeló with Xavi Forés as a rider. In his first race with this bike Xavi finished as first Moto2 (I remember you that by the moment Moto2 bikes race together with Formula Extreme bikes, Xavi was 10th in the race), ahead of Dani Rivas. Both were fighting all the race.

In the trainings, Supersport rider Jordi Torres was once again faster than the Moto2 bikes. His SS pole was 1:47,688, while Xavi Fores best lap was 1:48,111. However during the race Xavi improved his time, his best race lap was 1:47,743.
If we look at the total time of the race, Jordi Torres finished the race (16 laps) with one second less than Forés. From this data we can conclude that at this moment Moto2 bikes are at the same level of SS bikes.

Diego Lozano was the FTR rider, his best time in the trainings was 1:51,091, so almost 3 seconds slower than Forés, this has sense if we take into account that it was the first time that this bike rode on a track, and of course there is still a lot of setup work to do.

I am curious to see what happens in the 2 final rounds of the championship, in Jerez and Valencia, where maybe we will see more new Moto2 from the World Championship teams.

Action photos were made by Josep Pujol, and regarding the bike’s photos, I uploaded several ones to the Bottpower Flickr gallery.

Since the last change of the rules saying that all Moto2 bikes will use a Honda engine, I didn’t write about our project. We had some news, the most important is the incorporation of Pablo Gonzalez de Chaves to the Bottpower team.
Since August I work in Bottpower full-time and now Pablo is doing the same. For those of you which don’t know who is Pablo, he is one of the designers of the Demonstener D1200R that already appeared some time ago in this blog.

Pablo has an enviable CV, he worked as designer in Lamborghini, and last summer he finished his MSc in Motorsport Engineering, in Oxford Brookes, England. He went there to study because he achieved a Fernando Alonso scholarship.. I think he has been a great signing for Bottpower!  :-)

Pablo is engineer, but one of his strong points is industrial design. In Bottpower, till now this task was made by Hugo van Waaijen, but for this Moto2 project we need to work very fast and Hugo can not work full-time on it, so Pablo is the one who is working in the Moto2 bodywork design.

By the way, by the moment we call the bike BOTT M210 (M2 because it is a Moto2 bike, and 10 because it is our prototype for 2010 season).

Next image is a sketch made by Pablo which shows the way we are following regarding the bodywork design.

Pablo: “We are looking for a bodywork that covers the bike almost completely. A bodywork with classic and smooth shapes, far from current aesthetics of street superbikes. The size will be halfway through the compact bodyworks of current SuperSports and the more “enfolding” Aprilias 250 GGPP. We prefer no to do something too much enfolding to avoid problems with side wind.
On a race bike functionality and aerodynamics must be ahead of any trend so we also want to avoid ultra-short tails like the ones of the new Aprilias V4 and previous Honda MotoGP.
We still must add some air exhaust ducts at the sides of the bodywork, althoug the bike would be more aerodynamic if we could avoid it”.

Using Pablo’s sketch, Ernesto Arnaez from Husmee Studio Graphique! is studing graphic possibilities about which could be the “corporative” image of the bike. He has made a lot of sketches, and by the moment this is our favourite one.

Both sketches are not definitive designs, they are just concept sketches that show the way we are following by the moment.

Right now Pablo is already working in the bodywork design in 3D and I am focused on the chassis design. Our objective is to weld the chassis before the end of the year, and to have a  bike ready to ride in February.

As always you will find bigger size images in our Flickr gallery.