Should KTM’s MotoGP project get shut down at the end of the 2025 season - something that has been hinted at as the company teeters on the brink of bankruptcy - up to four bikes could disappear from the grid.
But there’s a precedent from the past that offers a way to keep the KTMs around for at least one more season.
Right now, the exact situation with KTM’s future is cloudy. There is, it seems, a firm commitment to withdraw from MotoGP at some point in the future as administrators look to recoup some of the massive €3billion debt KTM has found itself in - but the timeline for exactly when that exit will take place is less clear.
KTM is, in theory, locked into the championship until at least the end of 2026, and there are likely to be significant financial penalties for walking away early written into the contract with series promoter Dorna.
That means that there’s an incentive to remain on the grid but perhaps to do it as cheaply as possible - something that we’ve seen before in MotoGP with the demise of Kawasaki’s official team at the end of the 2008 season.
Established as a European subsidiary of Kawasaki Heavy Industries in 2002 and under the stewardship of team bosses Ichiro Yoda and Michael Bartholemy, Kawasaki Motors Racing was the Japanese firm’s official (and, as it didn’t have a satellite team, only) entry in the opening years of the MotoGP era.
Competing successfully with riders including Shinya Nakano, Olivier Jacque and Randy de Puniet, Kawasaki was a semi-regular top six contender as well as managing the occasional podium finish - and very much looked to be on an upwards trajectory with the signing of former Suzuki rider John Hopkins for 2008.
However, that all came crashing to a halt as the impact of the global financial crash became apparent on Kawasaki’s parent company, and despite having already signed race winner Marco Melandri for 2009, the team soon announced its withdrawal from MotoGP.
But Kawasaki was in a similar position to where KTM might soon find itself, with the contractual penalties for breaking its obligations to Dorna likely to come close to what the firm would’ve spent on still fielding its factory squad.
So it came up with a different strategy and launched what was essentially a form of ghost team.
The former works Kawasaki team was rebranded as the Hayate Racing Team (the Japanese word for hurricane) and ran a single Kawasaki ZX-RR for Melandri.
"The contract with Kawasaki has been cancelled,” Melandri said at the time. “I had to make a big financial sacrifice, but the most important thing that I wanted was to find trust.
"I have nothing to lose. One month ago I had one foot outside the world championship, and now I have a team that is working solely for me.
“My motivation is this, and to show Kawasaki that they made a mistake in choosing to pull out their factory support."
But all development work ceased before the season had even got underway, meaning Melandri was always set for a difficult season.
Nonetheless, he somehow managed to deliver the occasional surprise result, including taking the team to a remarkable second place in a wet French Grand Prix behind Jorge Lorenzo’s Yamaha and ahead of Dani Pedrosa’s Honda.
He failed, of course, to convince the top bosses in Japan that they were wrong to pull out, and we’ve not seen a Kawasaki (in official spec, at least) in MotoGP since - but he did enough to help secure himself a ride for the following season back with his mid-2000s employer Gresini Honda.
But what Melandri and Hayate’s performance might have done is provide both Dorna and KTM with a ready-made solution to solve their current woes, should the administrators decide that a fully-fledged racing programme is too expensive going forward.
