Alex Rins’s continued injury absence will set up a sudden MotoGP return for a Honda veteran with only one previous premier-class start – from back in 2015 – at Misano this weekend.
Rins, who is racing for LCR Honda this year but will join Yamaha for 2024, has been out of action since breaking his leg in a crash at Mugello in June.
The Honda satellite team has had the manufacturer’s test rider Stefan Bradl and its World Superbike rider Iker Lecuona fill in during that time.
But Bradl is already entered for Misano as a wildcard, while Lecuona – who was thought to be in the mix as Rins’s potential full-time replacement for 2024 before LCR and Honda zeroed in on Johann Zarco – will be racing in WSBK at Magny-Cours.
LCR ran Tetsuta Nagashima as a stand-in last year, but this time will be field a fellow Suzuka 8 Hours winner of his in 33-year-old Tamuki Takahashi.
Takahashi’s MotoGP baptism
In his role as an HRC tester, Takahashi was given a one-off chance to contest a MotoGP weekend back in 2015, entered as a “young gun” Honda wildcard for its home race at Motegi.
He took out of it four points for a 12th place, an achievement that would’ve been a real eyebrow-raiser during this current era of MotoGP but was more par for the course at that time of Japanese manufacturer dominance and the presence of Open-class machinery to fill out the grid.
In that same race, regular Yamaha wildcard Katsuyuki Nakasuga was four places up on Takahashi – yet it was still a reasonable weekend for the Honda call-up.
Though he was of course aided by riding a main-class RC213V rather than the Open-class RC213V-RS, Takahashi was well clear of the bottom of the classification through the weekend, qualifying 19th in the dry before his points-scoring finish in the wet race that followed.
Elsewhere on the CV
A Japanese Superbike champion in 2017 and runner-up on five other occasions, Takahashi has not had much in the way of international success in the years since his MotoGP call-up – with fairly anonymous stints representing Honda in World Superbike and British Superbike.
However, having gone into that MotoGP debut with three Suzuka 8 Hours wins under his belt already (the first of those coming with Takaaki Nakagami, who he will partner at LCR this Misano weekend, as one of his team-mates), he has added two more in 2022 and 2023.
