Some inventions, tools, and techniques have advanced the sport of motocross significantly since their inception. The Racer X staff explains some of those advancements in this feature, “Next Level,” and although we’ve already explored what data management could do in the future, this month we’re taking a look at what’s already doing on the track, with the help of Athena’s Dan Truman.
Athena, as you probably know, makes gasket kits for just about every rebuild job you can think of, as well as cylinders, hard parts, and more, but some of the most exciting products they make come out of their electronic division, named GET. The biggest thing everyone knows GET for is their ECUs (electronic control unit), which are everywhere in racing these days. There’s a reason they’re so prevalent, too, explains Truman.
“It’s an aftermarket ECU, and with it you can manage fuel, ignition timing, and other parameters," Truman said. "With an aftermarket ECU it opens up more parameters than somebody could do with a stock ECU. The difference is how in-depth you can go. Since we manufacture the product, we can open it up more than a stock bike.”
That might not sound revolutionary at first, but on the pro side of things, when used in conjunction with data acquisition, this is a huge deal.
“On the racing side, the teams we work with, they have our software, it’s called Maya, and it’s how they map on the dyno or on the track and things like that,” Truman explains. “We also work with our data acquisition staff, and they use Marelli Wintax, a software used for data acquisition. It’s the same software that’s used in MotoGP racing. We can see clutch sensors, suspension sensors, and we can see how the bike runs. If there’s an issue, we can see what caused it, be it fuel related, from mapping, something else, we can see all of it in the data.”
“The team and staff, after every practice you’ll see someone plugging into the bike. They’re downloading data so they can view a track map (generated by GPS) and how the bike ran. Maybe it was too rich or too lean, and we can make changes to that. Or sometimes the 450 guy has too much power and he needs to slow the bike down in some spots, or maybe we need to take some engine braking out. It’s a very strong adjustment tool, and that’s the benefit of having data. If a guy is always in second gear in a specific area, we can work on that area. Or at a specific RPM, or specific RPM and throttle position. You can make changes based off all kinds of data.
“We have technology that works like a traction control, and we have a patent on it. In theory it gives you less power. It senses a rate of change in RPM, or an RPM spike. In simple terms, our ECU reduces power, but it does a lot of things to reduce that power, it doesn’t just take power away. When your wheel starts to break loose it gives you more traction. When we were testing with Stewart at his house in like 2010 or 2011, he was trying to clear a really big jump, like a quad or something. He was like, ‘I’ll never make that jump with less power. I’m using everything I have already.’ We told him, ‘If you use the traction control, from point A to point B, you’re going to go faster. Then he over jumped it!”
One of the most beneficial areas is starting. Have you noticed how well Jett Lawrence always seems to get out of the gate? Yes, Lawrence is already loaded with talent, but his launches are also aided by a ton of data.
“What we can do, say, with starts, especially since they’re starting on grates now, we can develop starting strategies because it’s the same consistency every week,” Truman says. “We can see RPM, wheelspin, we can see everything. And I can go to our rider and tell him we’re going to get the best start at a specific RPM. And we have an RPM light that tells him when he’s in that range. He still has to execute, the rider still has to work, but as long as he releases the clutch properly, he should get the holeshot because everything is optimized. We have so much more information now.
“We started working with Honda this year, and they decided they wanted to race Anaheim 1 with it. The very first heat race Jett Lawrence got a really bad start. We were like, ‘Oh shit, maybe we messed up.’ Jett came off the track and Jett was like, ‘Dude, the bike just spun!’ We plugged in and looked at the data, and Jett had accidentally deactivated the launch control. So, of course, he had a bunch of wheelspin because he had so much power. We showed him the data and he was like, ‘Oh, sorry, I made a mistake!’ That’s a scenario in which, if we didn’t have data, we would have thought something else was wrong. We would have been searching around for the problem.”
Situations in which you aren’t sure what problem you’re facing are tough, but being able to review data simplifies things exponentially.
“On Hunter’s [Lawrence] bike in Florida one time, he thought there was some kind of issue with it, like something was wrong,” Truman recalls. “We looked at the data and he was 100 percent right. There was something we needed to adjust and fix, and had we not known exactly what was wrong, we could have been changing motors and all kinds of stuff. We would have been changing parts and searching for the issue, but the data showed us exactly what we needed to do. That’s huge.”
This is something that goes well beyond the pro ranks too.
“You can run diagnostics on your bike too,” Truman says. “With your phone you can do it. If you’re an everyday guy out at the track and you’re having an issue, say your bike is hard to start, you can run diagnostics on your phone and maybe you have a bad TPS sensor or something, and it’ll tell you right there on your phone. With a stock ECU you have to take it to a dealer.”
In the grand scheme of things, we aren’t that far removed from the days of manually changing jets and needles in carbureted machines, but when you look at how much evolution that’s taken place in the last ten or fifteen years, specifically on the electronic side of things, those days seem prehistoric. Anytime that’s the case, you know you’re dealing with a concept that truly is Next Level.
