Spy Attitude: Farewell to the Aprilia RS-GP we know!

Next year Aprilia will bring a new bike, with a very important modification to the engine. Meanwhile, let's look at the next 2019 version.

As we know, the RS-GP that we know in its current form has had its day. Next year a new bike will start, with the most important change: we are talking about the V4 engine at 90 °, compared to the 72 ° of the V4 that has equipped the motorcycles of Aleix Espargaro and Andrea Iannone from 2016 to this year. The line previously chosen by Honda and KTM will then follow.

"A 90 ° cylinder angle is the optimal solution" has explained Jan Witteveen, former designer Aprilia. "It gives you the opportunity to make the suction area more optimal, better positioned. It is then possible to use an air box with greater volume. The entire engine can be more compact. With a cylinder angle of less than 90 °, the suction area widens. The air box then becomes smaller and therefore has lower efficiency, as does the flow. From April 2016, Aprilia had a cylinder angle of 72 ° in MotoGP (60 ° in Superbike). Instead 90 ° are considered optimal. Honda even had a tilt angle of 92 °, which however had other disadvantages. "

Looking forward to discovering this news at the Sepang test in February, let's take a last look at the 2019 RS-GP, as it appeared during the test in Valencia. While this will soon become a museum piece, Aprilia took advantage of the Valencia test to do the same work done by Ducati on the different stiffnesses of the rear tire and swingarm. The RS-GP has even been equipped with a sort of tow hook to fix a third laser on the axis of the bike. Although not entirely certain, it seemed to us to see plates on the fork for other lasers.

For the rest, the bike changed little during the year. As in Suzuki, the frame is interesting because it has removable legs for mounting the engine, which allows you to vary the stiffness. A non-pierced swingarm was present on one of Bradley Smith's motorcycle workshops… Also present was a 'holeshot device' on the fork.

The original article on paddock-gp.com