MotoGP, The new Suzuki GSX-RR winglets

At the beginning they were grins, if not out and out poking fun, when it was clear that Ducati had decidedly gone down the path of putting spoilers on the sides of the fairing.

"They serve no purpose". "The riders won’t even notice a difference” were the most common comments. Then, just before a Dorna coup had them banned, they suddenly began to crop up on the fairings of the rivals of the Red bike from Bologna.

The first to copy them was Yamaha, then followed by Honda and finally Suzuki and Aprilia. And now that the conversion is complete and from 2017 the winglets will be banned, everyone continues to experiment, having realized that by keeping the front end down in acceleration, the traction control’s cut in power can be managed better to the benefit of acceleration.

"The bike lifts less when I accelerate - confirmed Maverick Viñales at the Red Bull Ring - and here this is important because there are a lot of corners where you restart from a very low speed."

Beyond whether or not you like them, the spoilers would have become a distinctive mark of the prototypes, standing out from the factory derivative bikes. Although, it would not have been long (as happened already in the car segment) before they would have made their appearance on the roads as well (after all, the Kawasaki H2R already has them).