Performance analysis of the MotoGP motorcycle by means of visualization of its racing line

The racing line of a MotoGP motorcycle summarises the combined effect of the riding style, vehicle setup and control strategies, and its identification is thus a key factor in performance analysis: once the trajectory is known, every acquired channel can be referred to a position on the circuit rather than to an instant in time. From 2027, by decision of the GPC, RTK GPS positioning will be introduced at official MotoGP events, with the acquisitions supplied to the teams. The satellite position signal, so far allowed only in private development tests and exploited merely as a validation reference for a trajectory reconstructed by dead reckoning, therefore becomes a primary source of information, with an accuracy of the order of a few centimetres. This thesis develops a processing chain dedicated to such data. The raw acquisition, external to the motorcycle, is validated against the accuracy indicators published by the receiver, converted into the local frame of the circuit, synchronised with the on-board acquisition and rigidly aligned to the track layout using the kerbs as a geometric constraint; each sample is then referred to the curvilinear abscissa of the track centerline, an absolute and repeatable spatial reference on which a new method for comparing lap, turn and riding phase times is built. The racing line so reconstructed is accurate to a few centimetres, one to two orders of magnitude better than what dead reckoning allowed, and the parameters of the alignment prove repeatable across laps, runs, receivers and riders of the same circuit. The comparison between laps, which no longer requires any correspondence to be estimated between them, agrees with the method previously in use to within a few hundredths of a second, and wherever the two diverge the reason is identifiable and attributable to one of them. The tool is delivered as a MATLAB application with a dedicated interface. It has proved consistent across all the RTK acquisitions available and in every working mode developed, including the including the lite mode, which relies on the satellite acquisition alone and remains usable when the on-board data are missing or invalid.