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This year MotoGP bikes should have a new electronic control unit, but the conditional is a must. Magneti Marelli, the sole supplier for the premier class, has in fact updated its ECU but has come up against a problem, namely the difficulty of getting hold of sufficient semiconductors to produce enough units for all the teams.
In the Sepang tests, only the official teams were supplied with the new material, while the satellite teams continued to use the 2022 ECU. Less than a month before the start of the championship, there would be a concrete risk of not being able to have enough ECUs to go around.
At the moment, according to what GPOne has learned, the MSMA (the manufacturers' association) is deciding what to do in view of the start of the new season. There are two alternatives: either to use all the old ECUs until the new ones are ready, or to allow only the factory teams to use the update.
So, what’s all the fuss about? Motorsport quotes an anonymous source from a Ducati satellite team: “the new control unit is not radically different, but a more powerful evolution. It's currently undeveloped and we don't see any advantages over the old one, it just has more memory and a faster processor." A colleague of his at Honda is also on the same line: "nothing changes for the riders". In Aprilia, on the other hand, they seem to prefer the old one: "the new one has given us some problems, it hasn't been developed yet".
We must specify that we are talking about a different hardware, because the software will remain the same for everyone, official team and satellites. However, a faster 'brain' for processing data could give an advantage and hence the ongoing discussions to understand how to solve the problem.
