As a mental exercise, let’s first set the task of presenting Maverick Vinales’ move to Aprilia in MotoGP as an unqualified success. This is actually a very easy undertaking.
Vinales is certainly Aprilia’s best team-mate to Aleix Espargaro. The Spanish veteran had chewed up and spat out the likes of Sam Lowes, Scott Redding and Bradley Smith (and was also well clear of Lorenzo Savadori, who does at least remain in the programme). Andrea Iannone was perhaps on his way to figuring something out with the RS-GP, but received his doping ban well before he could be a consistent thorn in Espargaro’s side.
Vinales is exactly that – so he’s already an obvious upgrade. And, having been brought in as something akin to ‘damaged goods’ given the embarrassing way in which his Yamaha tenure concluded, Vinales has been very good at maintaining a positive (sometimes overly so) public persona even when being stymied by certain technical issues that Aprilia really should have ironed out by now.
There’s your glass-half-full take. But you don’t bring in a nine-time premier-class race winner to simply shore up your line-up, and you don’t bring in somebody who had a clear edge over Espargaro back in their Suzuki days to only be there or thereabouts with Espargaro.
Vinales has now logged 33 starts as an Aprilia rider and, while he’s yet to lead a lap in Aprilia colours, he’s come reasonably close to winning – at Assen and Silverstone last year and Portimao this year.
But he has also gone missing for periods of time, most recently through the Mugello-Sachsenring double-header – although this was one in which an apparent late-diagnosed engine problem played its part.
At Assen, he picked off Jack Miller, Miguel Oliveira and Luca Marini in rapid succession over the opening three-and-a-bit laps before crashing out of fifth place just as it looked like a podium (almost certainly not a win, given Pecco Bagnaia and Marco Bezzecchi seemed to have more) was well on the cards – as Espargaro proved.
“We need to continue,” Vinales said afterwards. “I am discovering the limit of this bike and this can happen.
“I just started with a killer mentality, I pushed, pushed like hell. And it can happen – and it happened, so we must learn, of course, I must learn the bike; we learned a lot in Mugello and Sachsenring, we learned what we need, and it’s a matter of time.”
But do ‘proof of concept’ races really cut it anymore almost two years into Vinales’s Aprilia tenure? We know he can be quick on the RS-GP, we’ve seen it repeatedly, but the fact of the matter is a first win looks no closer than it did a full season ago.
The obvious caveat is that Ducati is somehow a much stronger proposition now than it had been even a year ago, so win opportunities are more scarce. But it’s a concern that Vinales is now crashing – something he almost never seemed to do on the RS-GP before – while pushing to match his previous Aprilia highs.
His five crashes so far this season – three of them having led to non-scores (solo errors in the Sachsenring sprint and the Dutch TT, and a Bagnaia collision at Le Mans that was a 50/50 or at worst 40/60 incident) – aren’t a shameful tally, but they represent a remarkable 150% increase on the total number from all of last year.
In the meantime, he is 3-5 versus Espargaro in qualifying and now 21 points down in the standings, even if his team-mate hasn’t had the tidiest season himself.
The aforementioned qualifying is a problem. It is not a dealbreaker in itself – the Aprilia doesn’t seem to qualify meaningfully worse than the KTM RC16 – but without the magic launches the RC16 is routinely capable of, and combined with Vinales’ general reputation for opening-lap tardiness, it makes for an unfortunate recipe.
Maverick Vinales in 2023
Average qualifying: 8.6
Total first-lap gains/losses, in sprints: -15 positions
Total first-lap gains/losses, in GPs: -12 positions
Average first-lap gains/losses, per start: -1.7 positions
The hole dug by those variables isn’t one Vinales and Aprilia are best-equipped to tackle – the 2023 RS-GP loves to make the front tyre pressure go through the roof while chasing, and Vinales himself seems a little timid in making his way through. Perhaps that’s a reflection of the bike, but it also just seems a Vinales trait at this point.
Occasionally, something will click – there was a lot to enjoy in his emergent charges at Le Mans and Assen, but both were quickly snuffed out by accidents.
“I was feeling good!” Vinales added of Assen. “Otherwise I don’t push. I was feeling very good, I was overtaking everyone on the braking of Turn 1, so the bike was working well.
“And nothing. I just pushed, and when you push, this can happen!”
It was “father reflexes”, joked Vinales, a father to one daughter at the time and two daughters now following a summer break addition.
Silverstone, where Vinales took his first premier-class win on the Suzuki back in 2016, awaits after the break.
“When we take out the maximum from our bike, we are able to fight in the front.
“We’ll see in the future. We need to stay calm, feet on the ground, Assen is a special track, we’re going to arrive to Silverstone. Day by day, day by day, taking out the maximum, understanding what we need to do with qualifying tyres because still I think we are far from our best. And keep it calm, keep it simple.
“I hope in the second part of the season we have the wind on the back. Because we are the time running with headwind, all the time. It’s a nightmare.
“But we recover well, we are strong, mentally we are very strong.
“We have a lot of potential. In Le Mans, problem. In Jerez, I broke [lost the chain]. In Austin, yellow flag [compromised qualifying]. It can happen. And this is not in our hands.
“But in our hands is to do a bike better for one lap. So this is what we’re going to try to do.”
A good Silverstone seems essential. A good second part of the season obviously does as well.
Now that Aprilia has a satellite team, a fitter Miguel Oliveira is bound to be a nuisance soon enough. And there will be some big names on the market for 2025, when Vinales’ current deal runs out.
He and Aprilia are no longer in a position where it will be thanking its lucky stars to simply have a rider of his calibre and pedigree. The value dynamic has changed.
It can change again. Vinales stresses that his old-new crew chief this year, former Suzuki man Jose Manuel Cazeaux, is still learning the bike, and we know from his past that he can be an excellent qualifier.
But it also feels eminently possible that Vinales already is the exact rider that he will be at Aprilia for the next year and a half, and in that case he will be replaceable if not 100% replaced. And while he’s talented enough to find another port in a storm after that to continue what will be an increasingly nomadic career, it’ll likely be satellite team doors that will open – and likely cut off any realistic path he still has to a championship somewhere down the line.
The alternative is to improve, to finally put all the pieces together. These pages are usually kind to Maverick so it will not surprise you I still see that alternative as a possibility.
And while I must be impartial to the outcome of any battles for race victories or championships, I’ve always thought a regularly frontrunning Vinales would be good for MotoGP. He has just the right amount of talent and on-track flair to make a season better. But he’s not getting any younger, while the MotoGP grid is.
It feels like he’s at the crossroads once again, staring at two paths labelled ‘Star’ and ‘Also-ran’. Except this time one of his feet is already planted in the latter.
