You won’t be surprised to hear that aerodynamics is a subject close to our hearts at White Motorcycle Concepts. Whether it’s using air to improve grip or finding ways to slip through it more seamlessly it’s a field with untapped benefits for riders both on the road and the track and it’s fascinating to see the innovations appearing from other engineers with a similar view.
We’re only at the start of 2026 but already this year we’ve seen the publications of a couple of intriguing patent applications from big names in the motorcycle industry that hint at future developments to keep an eye on in the future.
The first comes from Piaggio, and more specifically engineers working on Aprilia’s sports bike range. It piqued our interest not least because the patent application’s international search report lists our own patent (WO/2020/030749) among the documents considered to be relevant to it, cited as a ‘defining the general state of the art.’
Piaggio’s patent application, first filed back in 2024 but only just published, applies some smart thinking to the interplay between a rider and a motorcycle, illustrating how a bike’s aerodynamic behaviour could be beneficially impacted by the natural movement of the rider to both reduce drag and add a new element of rear downforce during corners.
It illustrates an evolution of the sort of vertical, rear-mounted ‘leg wings’ that have occasionally appeared on Aprilia’s MotoGP bikes over the last year or two, and which were a notable addition to the company’s ultra-limited, track-only RSV4 X-GP that was launched towards the end of 2025. However, these are notably different as they’re both substantially larger than the versions we’ve seen before, and they’re specifically bolted to road-going bikes, using the pillion footpeg brackets as their mounting points.
The document explains how these new panels work to smooth airflow when the bike’s travelling in a straight line, but indicates that they change their purpose from drag-reduction to downforce-generation once the rider shifts his body into a cornering posture. Two distinct, and usually contrasting, benefits from one idea.
The panels have a wing-shaped cross-section and sit a few centimetres away from each side of the bike’s tail, just behind the rider’s calves. Seen top-down, with the rider aboard, they align with the outside of the rider’s legs and taper towards the bike’s tail, creating a smoother surface for airflow coming off the side fairings to follow as it travels to the back of the bike. That should help cut drag and improve top speed if the panels work as expected. In this state, most of the air travels past the outsides of the leg wings, as the rider’s legs block it from being able to go between the wings and the bike’s tail.
In corners, the idea’s second benefit emerges. When the rider shifts his bodyweight to hang off on the inside of the turn, knee extended towards the ground, the leg wing on the side of the bike nearer the inside of the corner gets more fully exposed to the airstream. Air coming off the fairing goes between the bike and the rider’s extended leg, hitting the twisted, aerofoil shape of the leg wing, generating downforce. Its counterpart on the other side remains blocked by the rider’s leg, so can’t create an opposing aerodynamic effect.
If the winglets work as well as intended, the idea looks like a strong one: an improvement in top speed or fuel economy allied to increased downforce in corners, all without resorting to complex, movable aerodynamics surfaces. Over and above that, the fact that the panels could be bolted to virtually any motorcycle – the patent depicts then on an RSV4, but all that’s really required is a set of pillion footpeg brackets to act as mounting points – means they have the potential to be rapidly adopted without major changes to existing designs.
That’s not something that could be said for the other aerodynamics idea that’s caught our attention in early 2026, but it’s worth a mention regardless. BMW – a company that, like Piaggio, has been at the forefront of motorcycle aerodynamics in recent years – has filed an application for a patent around the use of the Magnus effect, and specifically Flettner rotors, instead of conventional winglets on a bike.
The Magnus effect is the phenomenon that allows a spinning object to create an aerodynamic force perpendicular to its direction of travel. It’s often illustrated by the curving paths taken by spinning tennis balls, cricket balls or footballs, and occurs because friction between the air and the surface of the spinning object means air will travel faster on one side than the other, creating a pressure differential. Unsurprisingly there have been effects to harness its aerodynamic potential, most notably in the form of Flettner rotors that have been used occasionally instead of sails on ships since the 1920s.
BMW’s idea is to use miniature Flettner rotors on bikes instead of winglets. Powered by electric motors that spin them, according to the documents, up to around 80,000rpm, the rotors are about 20cm long and 4 or 5cm in diameter. Why use Flettner rotors instead of normal wing profiles? There are a couple of key advantages. One is that the amount of downforce and corresponding drag could be tweaked by changing the speed of spin, rather than relying on the wing’s angle and the bike’s own speed. More importantly, perhaps, if spinning the Flettner rotors will be able to produce downforce regardless of the bike’s pitch; even in a near-vertical wheelie, the front rotors will be pushing the nose down.
The BMW patent application also suggest the rotor direction could be reversed, so specific winglets could create lift instead of downforce. In a corner, for example, because they’re mounted on an angle, the inside winglet could switch to create lift, pulling the bike towards the apex, while the outside one keeps turning the other way to push the front of the bike towards the ground.
Between the simplicity of Aprilia’s idea and the leftfield thinking of BMW’s, it’s clear that there’s plenty left to come in the field of motorcycle aerodynamics.
