"Standing start simulation of a MotoGP prototype: modelling & performance analysis"

In the recent MotoGP era, the importance of the standing start on the race result is continuously growing, due to difficulty of overtaking and tires management in dirty air. Each rider's desire of imposing to others his race pace, combined with the upcoming regulations for the 2027 season and the ban of the ride-height devices, is pushing teams to dive deeper in the investigation of this specific maneuver, with the aim of better understanding the key factors and unlocking more performance. The goal of the thesis is to build a simulation tool, developing a pre-existing co-simulation environment, to virtually represent the maneuver. The starting point is the choice a reference experimental launch and the analysis the main features in order to extract the control inputs and the required multibody model settings. Then, a core part is the implementation of the electronic strategy involved. One of the main characters is the clutch, and its modelling strongly influences the tool's fidelity to real track data; for this reason, part of the work features the investigation of different models, both static and dynamic. At the end, the aim is to achieve a satisfying correlation with the experimental data: once this result is obtained the tool can be used to predict the effects of different settings or technical solutions.