A few years ago, if you’d suggested that a satellite Yamaha MotoGP team would be struggling to find riders, people would have laughed at you.
The M1 is considered the most rookie-friendly bike in the series, it’s been the first choice for every aspiring MotoGP newcomer for the best part of a decade.
Johann Zarco was an immediate frontrunner with it for Tech3 in 2017/18, and then when the new Petronas SRT team became Yamaha’s partner for 2019 things stepped up another level.
Its rookie Fabio Quartararo took the fight to Marc Marquez and Honda throughout Petronas’ first season, and then last year Quartararo went on a winning spree that made him early title favourite before his team-mate Franco Morbidelli surged through to second in the championship.
Yet just a few months on, Petronas cannot find riders to fill its 2022 seats.
Why have things gone so wrong?
It’s been a tough year for the Malaysian team in the MotoGP rider market. It was aware for a while that it would probably need to find a replacement for the retiring Valentino Rossi to join current rider Morbidelli.
Then things became exponentially tougher when Maverick Vinales’ departure from the factory Yamaha team meant Morbidelli was promoted and Petronas was left looking to fill two seats.
It’s tried to lure a whole host of names to its side since then and seemingly been met with far more rejections than anyone could have ever imagined.
Perhaps highest on the list was current World Superbike championship contender Toprak Razgatlioglu, who was seen by many as the perfect fit for the team.
Already a Yamaha rider, exceptionally fast and talented, young enough to be groomed into a future star and coming from a region of the world with a huge untapped marketing potential, he was a surefire bet – until he told Petronas he was more interested in staying in WSB.
Similarly, there was also interest in American WSB rider Garrett Gerloff, who actually has experience riding the team’s MotoGP machine after replacing the injured Morbidelli last month at the Assen round of the series in something of an audition for the role.
But he too has since elected to remain in the production bike series, signing an extension to his Yamaha contract for another year.
Gerloff is believed to still potentially be on Yamaha’s MotoGP shopping list, and able to be moved if the option presents itself thanks to having a contract directly with the manufacturer and not with his GRT Yamaha team in WSB. But he’s nonetheless another name who initially said no to Petronas.
Then of course there’s the Raul Fernandez fiasco. Yamaha tried hard to sign him for the coming year only to see its chances stolen away by some aggressive contractual fights with KTM which, recognising the young Spanish’s star potential, was no doubt not only keen to retain his services but to make sure rivals didn’t benefit from them.
But the reality of the matter is that Yamaha has fallen into this trap mainly due to timing rather than the Petronas team suddenly becoming an unappealing option – its difficult 2021 notwithstanding.
It didn’t go into 2021 thinking it was going to need an all-new 2022 line-up: Morbidelli’s exit is a Vinales-inspired shock, and as the year began there was optimism that the move to a satellite team might revitalise Rossi and prolong his career, rather than underlining that it’s time to go.
And in the time when Yamaha wasn’t expecting to need them, the biggest names in Moto2 were set on moves that will take them into MotoGP for next year, and that doesn’t leave much in the way of big name talent for Yamaha to try and snap up.
Styrian Grand Prix Moto2 winner Marco Bezzecchi is the biggest name still to be confirmed in a MotoGP seat for next year, but despite Petronas Yamaha showing an interest it’s highly unlikely we’ll see him leaving his current VR46 team as it expands to a two-bike set-up in the premier class.
The second Ducati there is built for ‘Bezz’, and sending him instead to Yamaha would leave Rossi’s team in an even trickier spot when it comes to finding a hot young talent to join Luca Marini next year than Petronas is in now.
Elsewhere, championship leader Remy Gardner and team-mate and current runner-up Fernandez are both bound for the Tech3 KTM team. Fabio Di Giannantonio, fifth in the Moto2 championship, will join the newly-formed Gresini Ducati team.
Among the other frontrunners there, that leaves Sam Lowes, a veteran of the Moto2 class whose MotoGP chance at Aprilia didn’t work out, and Aron Canet.
Canet is certainly a hot tip for the future, but he seems keen to stay another year in Moto2, having just signed a contract to jump from Speed-Up to Kalex chassis with the Pons Racing team next year.
Beyond those names, the likely candidates come from a really mixed bag of riders whose level is arguably all roughly the same.
Augusto Fernandez, Xavi Vierge, Marcel Schrotter, Jake Dixon, and Joe Roberts have all been linked to the two free seats – yet you’d think none of them would exactly set the world alight the way Quartararo did in 2019.
Which means that the squad’s best option, for at least one of its seats, might involve thinking outside the box.
It’s got a hotshot Moto3 rider who has really matured this year in the shape of Darryn Binder. Already believed to have signed a Moto2 deal with the team for next year, arguably he’s in a better place to make the big leap from Moto3 to MotoGP than Jack Miller was when he did it – and that worked out OK in the end, didn’t it?
