With the news this morning that Maverick Vinales has broken his two-year contract with Monster Energy Yamaha and will now leave the team at the end of 2021, it seems like his move to Aprilia, although still to be officially confirmed, is all but a given.
Which raises the question: is he heading to Aprilia because it’s a genuine chance for a fresh start, or is it the only option left open to him if he wants a factory salary?
Well, first of all, it’s pretty obvious what Vinales himself thinks. Factory rider press contracts are certainly not the easiest things to escape from, unless there’s a mutual agreement to walk away from each other – which is exactly the case here, with the official Yamaha statement citing a “mutual decision to go their separate ways”.
What we can read from that is that Vinales wasn’t sacked: he chose to leave as much as Yamaha chose to replace him. He could have struggled through another year with the team to collect his salary if that’s all he was worried about – or he could have played the nuclear option and dared Yamaha to pay him to sit at home for 2022 while it paid a second salary to someone else to ride his bike.
So clearly the Spaniard thinks that Aprilia’s machine is good enough – and honestly, it’s hard to argue with his logic given the impressive results that Aleix Espargaro and (to a lesser extent) Lorenzo Savadori has displayed on a 2021 RS-GP machine that’s obviously a substantially better bike than any we’ve previously seen emerge from the racing department in Noale.
Espargaro in particular has been nothing short of exceptional this year. Still obviously hunting an elusive debut podium, he’s nonetheless finished six times in the top eight this year out of the opening nine races.
He’s not quite been setting the world on fire, sure, but this matches Vinales’ own record of top eight finishes (even if he’s had a win and a second place rather than a best of sixth).
And the prospect of recruiting a big name to come to sit opposite him in 2022 through the sheer strength of his success is something that Espargaro had in the back of his mind all year, as well.
Originally targeting Andrea Dovizioso, he admitted last weekend at the German Grand Prix that it’s what he feels the team needs to step up to the next level.
“I’ve done everything I can to convince everyone,” said Espargaro at the Sachsenring, “and I know that Massimo is trying to bring either a young talent or Dovi, who has a lot of experience and is a very fast rider.
“The faster I go, the closer to the winners I finish, the easier it’s going to be for Massimo to convince the others, but it’s difficult for me to go any faster.
“I hope that during the summer break they’re able to find a fast and good team-mate for 2022.”
Yet the thing is, the next level that they need might already have been unlocked with the simple fact of securing Vinales’ signature when you compare past performances of the pair and the current position of the bike.
The average difference between P1 and Espargaro in this year’s eight dry qualifying sessions has been a mere 0.44s – in reality, a tiny margin and one that’s in reality much smaller when it comes to race pace.
This isn’t the MotoGP grid of 10 years ago, where the best and worst bikes were separated by huge chunks of time: in 2012, the first Aprilia CRT machine home at Assen was Randy de Puniet, a minute and four seconds back on race winner Casey Stoner. This year, it was Espargaro, 10.346 seconds down on Fabio Quartararo.
And what I’m about to say next takes nothing away from Espargaro’s incredible achievements at the Aprilia team, where he’s done the lions’ share of development work alongside a revolving door of team-mates, but… Maverick Vinales is a faster rider.
In fact, The Race has previously heralded Espargaro as the worst team-mate in MotoGP to have due to his sheer tenacity and work ethic – and highlighted that in a MotoGP career that stretches all the way back to 2010, he’s only been beaten once by a team-mate in the championship standings. And that teammate? Vinales.
Not that this is putting Espargaro off a potential Vinales reunion. “If he finally decides to make a big change in his life like this one, the only thing I can say to him is, if he will feel more happy, go ahead, take it, he will be more than welcome,” the Aprilia man told MotoGP.com when the rumours surfaced during the weekend.
“I know how fast he is, I know how hard Aprilia is working, so Aprilia deserves to have a top rider like Maverick, and Maverick deserves to be happy, so why not?”
From a technical perspective, there’s still more to come, too. The 2021 RS-GP is a great bike – but it’s very much a first draft.
The 2022 machine’s testing programme is well underway, helmed by none other than new test rider Dovizioso, and the first rumours out of the Noale camp are that the new machine will be better in every regard: more refined, more polished, and faster all round.
So, is Vinales joining Aprilia because it’s his last hope, or has he bolted from Yamaha because there’s an offer on the table that theoretically looks just as good? You’ve got to think it’s the latter, especially when you hear his complaints about the environment he’s in at Yamaha. A change is, as they say, as good as a rest – but in this case, it might be even better.
