World Superbike champion Toprak Razgatlioglu is once again testing Yamaha’s MotoGP machine this week, joining test rider Cal Crutchlow at Jerez for a two-day outing, inevitably increasing speculation about the Turkish racer’s potential move to the premier class in the near future.
The confirmation of the test comes just days after he told the media that a 2024 deal would be make or break for him, with no prospect of making the jump from production to prototype racing after next season.
And while Yamaha might have extended him an olive branch by allowing him to trial their M1 for a second time (after his first outing at Aragon last year was slowed down by rain conditions), he also hinted once again that if a deal with the team isn’t forthcoming, he might be tempted to look elsewhere to secure his MotoGP future.
That presents something of a problem in itself for him and manager (and former world champion) Kenan Sofuoglu, however. Of the 22 seats on the grid, more than half are already contracted for next year, ruling out all but one of the factory options available to him – a red line that in the past has also been regularly repeated by Sofuoglu.
Another three of the remaining nine are presumably off limits, with there being no prospect of Razgatlioglu either stepping into the Idemitsu-backed LCR Honda seat or of him joining the VR46 Academy.
With that in mind, only four teams are left with free seats: but are any of them really all that attractive to the Turkish racer?
Monster Energy Yamaha
Obviously Franco Morbidelli’s seat is the one that Razgatlioglu is coveting. It would keep him a part of the same factory effort, allow him to debut on the only MotoGP bike he so far knows, and it would bring with it the full factory support that he’s repeatedly insisted upon in the past.
It would mean giving up his Red Bull personal sponsorship in place of Monster, but that’s a small step and one that we’ve seen plenty of others make in the past, most recently Enea Bastianini as he moved from Gresini to the factory Ducati team.
However, if paddock rumours are to be believed, Razgatlioglu is not (and never has been) Yamaha’s first call to replace Morbidelli, with the manufacturer instead hunting hard to get the signature of current Pramac Ducati rider Jorge Martin, with tentative contract talks already believed to be underway with the Spaniard.
He’s also desperate for a factory seat, and with nothing available at Ducati for the foreseeable future, Yamaha looks like his only chance. In a paddock where the known quantity is normally the best option, his proven race-winning pace in MotoGP will work in his favour when it comes to weighing him up against Razgatlioglu, too.
It’s not hard to believe that Yamaha’s future plans haven’t been complicated by their start to the season, too, though – with Morbidelli and not team-mate and former world champion Fabio Quartararo currently the team’s best-performing rider. It might not be enough to save his seat – but it may well have offered him a temporary stay of execution.
Tech3 Gas Gas
After Yamaha, the next best option for Razgatlioglu would inevitably be the Gas Gas-branded KTM machines at Tech3, given his considerable Red Bull links. They’re heavy backers of all of the Austrian brand’s motorsport efforts, and while there’s less energy drink banding on the RC16 machine this year, they’d presumably be delighted to keep him in their stable of athletes.
But whether KTM has room for him or not remains to be seen, because they’ve got a problem of their own right now: too many fast riders and not enough places to put them all.
The whole point of KTM’s Moto2 project is to make sure that riders don’t escape their grasp in the middleweight class: a hard lesson learned when they lost a young Marc Marquez to Honda. Now with the next Marquez – Pedro Acosta – in that Moto2 team, they have to find a space for him in MotoGP next season.
That should in theory come at the expense of reigning Moto2 world champion Augusto Fernandez, but he’s enjoyed his own strong start to 2023, scoring points in both races. KTM have a tough decision ahead of them, and adding Razgatlioglu’s name to the mix just complicates things a little too much for them.
Pramac Ducati
With two seats open right now, at least on paper, the chances of Razgatlioglu landing at Pramac might not be determined by the most likely departure from the team but rather by the other side of the garage.
Should Jorge Martin, as expected, find his way to Yamaha, that will open up one seat – but if VR46 Ducati racer Marco Bezzecchi, now a race winner, continues to impress in 2023, it’s no stretch of the imagination to suggest that he’s the most likely replacement for Martin in the second-tier team rather than on his current-year-old machinery.
That means that it’s Johann Zarco’s seat that Razgatlioglu might be aiming for – but with the veteran Frenchman both playing a key role as Ducati’s experienced racing test rider and still demonstrating (as he did in Termas de Rio Hondo last weekend) that he’s capable of fighting for wins, it’s hard to see him going anywhere just yet either.
Gresini Ducati
That leaves just two more seats for Razgatlioglu at Gresini Ducati, currently occupied by renaissance man Alex Marquez and by sophomore rider Fabio Di Giannantonio.
It’s hard to see the younger Marquez brother going anywhere given not just the fact that he brings some sponsorship with him but also that he’s made an impressively strong podium-fighting start to 2023 and might well be fighting for wins for the team before much longer.
Di Giannantonio has taken a little longer to get up to speed again after a pre-season ended by concussion at Portimao, but he too looked to be finding his form at Termas. And while he might be perhaps the most at-risk rider on the MotoGP grid for 2024 right now, Gresini will also want to keep an Italian in the fold and will give him time to improve.
But while Gresini might bring Toprak Razgatlioglu’s best MotoGP chance, it also represents something that he’s always said has been not what he wants: a satellite team running year-old machinery that’s unlikely to see any updates.
It also comes as part of a factory with an exceptionally stacked talent pipeline, limiting his chances for progression – and that might be enough to see him decide that it’s better to be a big fish in a smaller pond and stay where he is with the prospect of becoming a multiple world champion.
