MOW Goes to Aprilia: a day in the Noale Racing Department to see everything. Bombardoni on the bench, the wall street of the engineers, the development and feeling of the pilots – MOW

LThe Aprilia headquarters is a 15-minute walk from the station Noale – Scorzé, two and a half hours from Milan and half an hour from Venice. Outside, on a red background, with that character that is a trademark and metallic letters, the writing Aprilia. When you see it, the one written, think about the fact that in the life of a generation there has always been: the small RS two-strokes and the SR 50 sThey are among the main reasons for unexpected school promotions, seasons of waiting tables as well as, for some, the explanation for an existence that at fifteen years old may have no meaning, other than working on the carburetion in the garage. For others this stuff is more the Tuareg, the Pegaso, or the Tuono and the RSV Mille, the RSV4. A rush of icons. And then you end up thinking about the fact that Aprilia itself is the queen of the two-stroke world championship and the four-stroke Superbike, from the ideas of Jan Witteween and those of Gigi Dall’Igna. The same Aprilia that today races in MotoGP with the sole objective of winning seriously, and then repeating itself for as long as possible.

At the guardhouse they hand us a pass. Victoria Ortega Cabrera, press officer for Aprilia in MotoGP, comes to meet us, accompanying us to the entrance of the building which is part of the racing department. The entrance is spectacular, with an array of racing bikes produced within these walls over the years. We go up a flight of stairs, at the top is Antonio Boselli which brings us to conversation with Marco De Luca, Vehicle Manager for MotoGP. He comes from the automotive background, he worked in Ferrari, McLaren and in racing with Mercedes. It has been with Aprilia since July 2019. He has a deep and calm voice like Alessandro Orlando, a nice mechanical chronograph on his wrist and, probably, a right, rational and equation-proof answer to any question. We torture him for almost half an hour, he responds to everything with old-fashioned kindness, sacrificing the minutes of an important meeting. Luca doesn’t say it directly, yet the thing that struck him most with respect to the automotive world when he started working in MotoGP is the question of feeling. This stuff that everyone talks about and that no one has yet understood too well how to define. We will find out later that he is not the only one who thinks this way.

Antonio takes us on a tour of a large open space packed with engineers. A gigantic room with dozens of desks, people working on computers, motorcycle parts, research, ideas. It looks like a film about Silicon Valley, except that here everything is Italian: normal desks and normal computers, but there are exceptional people managing everything a man who works with MotoGP control units, another who is checking a file in which there are written everyone the driver’s comments on the last weekend and the possible changes to accommodate him. There is a mathematics, Elena De Cia, which is developing the electronic strategies for the next race. What is striking is the fact that everyone is almost completely responsible for their own affairs. Everyone trusts others because they know they are working with extremely capable people on a project who, in their field, it wants to be the best thing there is.