no hair products required, he puts his finger in the socket to dry his hair

I think they know, the question is whether Ducati will let them fix it or not. The carbon fibre frame doesn't work, and, as David at Motomatters has pointed out, a 90 degree V4 is too long. It needs to be a V60 or even inline to get the weight up the front. I get the feeling Ducati have reached tipping point now - there are already rumours about an alu frame for next year.

Oh, and now it seems the gearbox doesn't work either.

Of course, there is the "but Casey could ride it" argument. Bit of a mystery that.

Here's an interested fan's view. The Ducati has always had this problem of the lower cylinder forcing the engine weight back if there's to be clearance with the front tyre. When they were the only people running Bridgestone, Bridgestone developed a very sticky front tyre to suit this. When Yamaha then used the same tyre, Burgess-Rossi had to shift the weight of the bike back to suit so that the same tyre worked and the problem became getting rear grip. It took them several months of running the rear fork on the limits of it's adjustment, and experiments with headstock position to find the right balance too suit the tyres. When Bridgestone became the control tyre though, they built tyres for everybody and they were more evenly matched and more suited to the other narrow V-4s and straight-4s, Yamaha shifted their weight distribution to suit and it became more normal. Meanwhile Ducati started to get front end problems because they simply couldn't adjust their's to suit. What was worse was that the new tyres needed aggressive riding to get heat into them and were unpredictable when cold. Stoner found a way of dealing with this, but still had an unpredictable front tyre resulting in lots of front end wash outs.

So now we get to 2011 and the Ducati doesn't work with the current crop of Bridgestones built round the Japanese Honda-Yamaha bikes. The fundamental problem is one of weight distribution, not chassis stiffness. But the weight distribution problem may be impossible to solve. So I'm thinking the trick is to get the weight as far forward as is possible, and then to move the rider forwards as well. You can already see Rossi sitting right forward mid corner, so shorten the tank cover, give him clipons with some forward offset, shift the fairing forwards to provide clearance and move as many ancilliaries forwards as possible. Of course what may happen then is they still don't get the feel but lose rear grip instead. What's a puzzle in this is the current route they're taking of running the front very high. Presumably the rear is also run high and they're trying to get more pitch on braking and corner entry to get more weight onto the front tyre.

As an engineer, I've never really bought into this "chassis too stiff" theory. You can clearly see suspension working mid corner at maximum lean. The only thing that makes any sense to me is that a chassis can have a natural frequency that causes chatter or doesn't cause chatter and that is related a bit to stiffness. So the carbon airbox chassis and stressed engine looks like a good clever solution as long as it doesn't cause chatter. I think blaming that is wrong and the problems are all about weight distribution.

Then there's Indianapolis. Every single Ducati had problems with front grip. And the front pushing across the new tarmac ripped up the tyres. So did Simoncelli and to a lesser extent Lorenzo who like Rossi both also have a 250 two stroke style of really loading the front on corner entry. Stoner, Pedrosa, Dovizioso and Spies either worked round it or now have a style that doesn't load the front so much.

Interesting discussion, and I'm a massive fan of MotoGP and of Rossi. I've been feeling (hoping I guess) that this season they're simply 'working the problems out' ahead of next season, but the issue of the weight too far back won't go away with the current engine geometry. These guys are pretty smart though and have been in the game a long time, they must see the list of solutions and if developing a new engine (with a different, more weight-forward geometry) is not a possibility, then they'll find another way (I feel, perhaps with unwarranted optimism).

If tyres are the issue though I'd have thought we'd have seen more noises coming out of the Ducati camp about them.