Jan Witteveen. When Beggio said “No” in the face of a request for caution.
Proud but realistic, even today Jan Witteveen puts his face on the Cube project, as he always has. At the time of the Cube project he was the leader of all engineers and designers, being head of the racing department, and he always perceived this project as an important step. In fact, even after more than twenty years, Jan Witteveen invites us to consider the context as a first step in order to be able to understand what it was all about: “Of course it didn’t go the way we thought it would, the first one to say that is me. But there are several reasons. One of them is that we, in 2002, were not ready. I understood that, in fact I had proposed to delay the debut by a year, and enter in 2003, as indeed Ducati had also decided to do.” One wonders, of course, why it could not wait. The answer is lapidary: “Because it was not wanted!”
So Jan Witteveen removes the seals of secrecy from this affair: “Ivano Beggio, who was still the owner of Aprilia at that time, had also become president of MSMA (the association of Manufacturers involved in Grand Prix racing) so he wanted Aprilia to be present at the debut of the new era. Also as a matter of honor and pride. I tried to explain that it was better to wait, that one more year would do us a lot of good, but he did not accept this explanation. He wanted to go ahead as planned, only the facts confirmed that we would need at least another year.”
At this point Jan Witteveen begins to speak somewhat cryptically, “Let’s say that Cosworth brought things a little bit in its favor,” he says in a winking tone, arousing even more curiosity as to why the project, which had already started from an abnormal base-that is, not very in tune with typical motorcycle concepts-never progressed sensitively. “Cosworth possessed the technology to handle pneumatic valves-in fact, special things were needed to develop that system-in contrast, we didn’t have as much experience in this field, so we didn’t have the tools, the equipment, to handle everything as well as we could. They delayed the development a little bit from the contract time, so even for 2003 we were a little bit dependent on Cosworth.”
This consideration brings to mind the rumors in the paddock. And that is that there was an issue related to budget. In short, Cosworth was always asking for more for development, taking advantage of the situation to its advantage. As Jan says, Aprilia at that time could not go it alone because it had neither the structure nor the budget they needed to develop Formula 1 technology.
Today, that is, many years later, one could say that it had been a mistake already to slip into that condition, but he prefers to go further: “At the end of the 2003 season we also untied ourselves operationally, and so from the beginning of 2004 we began to do the development ourselves, in-house. That was the first year we were running everything ourselves, in-house, and we built a significantly evolved project with a lot of curiosity to see it in competition in 2005. But as everyone knows, right at the end of 2004 things changed: Aprilia, which had serious financial problems, joined the Piaggio Group.”
And the Group’s top management ended the MotoGP program immediately, claiming that it cost too much for the results it brought.
Thinking about it today, it was not a wrong consideration: in short, there was a kernel of truth in it. After all, that’s what they said and did in Kawasaki four years later, and then did in Suzuki twice (in late 2011 and 2022).
Jan Witteveen has now digested that affair, and prefers to see the glass half full: “I’m happy anyway, because I worked in a very important period from a technical point of view. Pneumatic valves, counter-rotating shaft, Ride by Wire: today all these things are the norm on a MotoGP bike, but at the beginning of the 2000s I was part of the group that put them for the first time, all together, on a racing bike. It means that, more than 20 years ago, we showed the way on how a modern racing bike should be made. And that remains for me a great satisfaction.”
Of course, Jan does not dwell too much on the fact that that “modern racing bike” was actually too modern for the capabilities of his racing department at the time, so the error of judgment remains: that group led by Jan Witteveen, but which was actually driven by the great passion and ambition of Ivano Beggio, put on the track a bike that only created problems for the rider, because of the brutal power delivery. That power, and that high rpm, turned out to be a limitation and not an advantage.
In fact, in the very early years of MotoGP it was Honda that hit the mark – making a “modern racing bike” – because it was powerful but well manageable by the rider. So at the dawn of MotoGP, the Japanese manufacturer surprised everyone. Even Witteveen. “Yes, it’s true, Honda made the right moves. We, much less so,” Jan admits today, well pleased to tell how it went.
“The original regulations said, ‘4-cylinder tot weight,’ ‘3-cylinder tot weight,’ ‘twin-cylinder tot weight,’ ‘over 4-cylinder tot weight…up to 6-cylinder.’ We started from this basis, but at one point Honda asked to allow the 5-cylinder to be as heavy as a 4-cylinder. After a brief discussion, the MSMA said “it’s okay, it’s not a problem,” because they were all convinced that no one would make engine with more than 4 cylinders.” Instead, Honda was making the V5. And when, in Japan, months later, Honda announced that they had made the 5-cylinder, I realized that that request had a very specific purpose: eh yes, first there was 10 kg difference from one to the other, then 4 and 5 had the same weight.”
The very idea of being able to surprise everyone by doing something different (as Honda did, come to think of it) is behind the decision to use an engine with an “inline 3” scheme.
“We wanted to do a different design. We thought the 4-cylinder would be chosen by everyone else, especially the Japanese. And then, there are also reasons of organization and management. It’s an engine with a unit displacement more like a Formula 1 engine: since we already had a collaboration in place with Cosworth, we thought we would do a technology transfer that would take away several problems. The planned displacement was 990cc, so that split meant a unit displacement of 330 cc, very close to the 350 cc of the Formula 1s (V10s) of the time, on which Cosworth had great experience. In this way, we had no problems in developing materials such as the piston, the connecting rod, the combustion chamber. Everything was already tested by Cosworth. And that was also part of the decision to immediately apply cutting-edge technology, such as the pneumatic valve system.Aprilia was the first to use this technology on motorcycles. We just weren’t as advanced as other companies in the field of ultra-high-performance four-strokes at that time.”
Cosworth did, but motorcycles are a different matter. “Cosworth was already a technical partner of ours, for the development of the Superbike twin-cylinder (the RSV 1000 SP): the components related to the combustion chamber, connecting rod, pistons, were derived from their technology. So for the RS Cube, we, in Aprilia, made the engine from the point of view of the crankcase and the gearbox, instead we relied on Cosworth for the performance part.”
At this point, Jan again shows how much he holds that record close to his heart: “We were the first to also adopt pneumatic valves, not just Ride by Wire, and in 2002 we were already using the crankshaft that runs in reverse. So- no technologies later adopted by everyone, but we were the first.”