The Gordon Murray T.50 has the highest specific output of any street car, generating a whopping 165 horsepower per liter of engine displacement. This is what we motorcyclists would call utterly boring — bikes have been putting up these kinds of power numbers for years. But Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained recently took some time out of his usual schedule of talking about cars to explain just how motorcycles manage to whoop cars so severely in the realm of specific output. His example is the Ducati Panigale V4R, a bike with MotoGP engineering tucked beneath a license plate, and specific output isn’t the only place it shines.
Fenske looks at Ducati’s V4 (found on the Panigale, Streetfighter, and other’s in the automaker’s stable) from a few different angles. Not only does he compare specific output to the T.50, he also looks at the V4 engine layout as opposed to the more traditional inline four — a comparison Yamaha’s engineers have been making for the entirety of this MotoGP season. He also discusses how the engine’s counter-rotating crankshaft affects the bike’s handling, and Duacti’s famous desmodromic valves.
We love an engineering breakdown
Some of Fenske’s explanations show a bit of unfamiliarity with bikes — he credits Ducati with using the V4 as a stressed member, something most motorcycle manufacturers do with all sorts of engine configurations, and forgets that MV Agusta also uses counter-rotating crankshafts — but he gets into some real detail about the V4’s engineering. He talks about the counter-rotating crankshaft’s effects on acceleration, decelerating, and handling, as well as the V4 layout’s benefits for cornering clearance. He even explains the desmodromic valve system, a design so complicated that every manufacturer but Ducati has long since abandoned it.
Fenske ends the video on a tease, in which he mentions the V4’s firing order without explaining it, so hopefully this isn’t the last time we see him delve into the world of two-wheeled math. There’s so much intricacy to be found on motorcycles, so many parts that have to be made smaller and more precise, and the engineering that comes out of those constraints can be truly mind-blowing. Give this video just 13 minutes of your time, and you’ll see why.
