Yamaha MotoGP boss Lin Jarvis has given the Japanese brand’s strongest indication yet that its goal is to return to having four bikes on the grid as soon as possible – and that the number one preference to make that happen lies with its former champion Valentino Rossi and his VR46 satellite team.
But, while Yamaha might be keen to lure Rossi away from Ducati to fill the hole left by RNF Racing’s surprise switch to Aprilia for 2023, the actual act of getting the Italian’s name on a contract isn’t as easy as saying that Yamaha wants it to happen – even with the might of series bosses Dorna behind it.
Losing RNF – a situation partly of Yamaha’s own making, given that it only offered team boss Razlan Razali a one-year deal for his new squad after the collapse of Petronas Yamaha – has put the Iwata factory in a somewhat tricky position when it comes to gathering data.
Now limited to just Fabio Quartararo and Franco Morbidelli not only to improve a struggling Yamaha M1 as a whole but also to specifically work towards race weekends, Jarvis conceded to German publication Speedweek that it’s a less than satisfactory situation – and one that Yamaha wants to rectify sooner rather than later.
“We discussed in Sepang on Saturday night how the lack of a customer team could affect the 2023 season,” Jarvis told Speedweek. “Now that we’re trying to get back on our feet after last season, when we didn’t have enough speed and performance, the lack of a customer team isn’t a disadvantage.
“But there can be disadvantages on the GP weekends when we need set-ups for different scenarios, when the weather changes and the decision on going straight into Q2 is already being made on Friday [on combined FP1/FP2 times, due to the new sprint format].
“Then our Italian competitor [Ducati] has the information and data of eight drivers, who try different things and test different tyre compounds; so we will certainly have disadvantages.
“That’s my opinion: It won’t be detrimental to the development of the bike, but it will be detrimental to racing it.”
Looking at the 2024 grid, however, options to immediately return to satellite status are limited. Pramac Racing is in a close-knit relationship with Ducati that’s unlikely to change, while Tech3’s promotion to full-factory Gas Gas status under the KTM banner further solidifies its position.
RNF Racing, in its honeymoon period with Aprilia, looks to be off the table this soon after making the move away from Yamaha, while luring Lucio Cecchinello’s LCR team from Honda would take more than just a promising technical package but also considerable financial support, given the three-way relationship between Cecchinello, Honda, and title sponsor Idemitsu.
That leaves Ducati’s two second-tier satellite teams theoretically on the market: Valentino Rossi’s VR46 Racing, and 2022’s dark horse success story Gresini Racing, who won four races with Ducati and Enea Bastianini – and who, judging by its Ducati-heavy 2023 livery, is moving towards the same position financially with the Bologna brand that LCR is in with Honda.
“We want to return to having a satellite team as soon as possible,” Jarvis added. “This has my absolute urgency, we don’t want to lose any unnecessary time. If we can find a solution for 2024 that fits our strategy for the future, it would be welcome.
“Of course there are lot of discussions with VR46 – we work closely with them, they run our Moto2 Master Camp team, we have a very close relationship with Valentino – he rode a factory Yamaha in the MotoGP world championship for 16 years.
“Logic would say that it would be a good direction for us to go.
“Valentino has two absolutely promising riders in Marco Bezzecchi and Luca Marini.”
It’s not the first time that a theorised link-up between Yamaha and VR46 has been suggested in recent months, with FIM President Jorge Viegas also making a somewhat-unusual proclamation that the deal had already been done some months ago – a statement precluded by the fact that VR46/Ducati already have a contract in place for 2024, as Jarvis himself acknowledged.
And it was also something VR46 team boss Uccio Salucci was also quick to point out when questioned about the president’s comments, suggesting that the reality contradicts whatever Dorna and the FIM might wish to happen, as they seek to break Ducati’s veritable stranglehold on the current grid.
“I don’t know why Viegas dropped this bomb,” Rossi’s best friend Salucci told Italian website GPone. “It’s a little strange because we don’t know anything about it.
“For the thousandth time, I repeat that we have a three-year contract with Ducati that will expire in 2024, with the possibility to renew for another two years. We will certainly respect it and then we will see if we continue or not in 2025. As I always said, for us it is important to have competitive bikes.”
And therein lies the crux of the matter: if VR46 was to trade Ducatis for Yamahas right now, it’d be trading arguably the best bike on the grid for one that has struggled to perform in the hands of anyone but Fabio Quartararo since 2020.
Though Yamaha looks on an upward trajectory for 2023 thanks to a significantly faster engine, albeit having seemingly lost its once-unbeatable qualifying performance in the process (at least if last week’s Sepang test is anything to go by), it would be a trade-off that would be very hard to convince current VR46 riders Marco Bezzecchi and Luca Marini to make. Marini has just topped both last year’s Valencia post-season test and February’s three-day Sepang test on a year-old Ducati.
Sure, Yamaha and Dorna could throw a major financial reward package at VR46 to try and get it across the finish line – but even that’s not a guaranteed success thanks to the unique nature of the team owner that they’re negotiating with.
Every other satellite team boss in the sport is there, at least in some sense, to make money. They run their teams as the businesses they are, and the fact that the end goal is to at least break even means that generous terms are always something that will turn a head.
But Valentino Rossi is there for the love of the sport. He doesn’t need to make money out of racing (he’s already done that), and instead his new ambition seems to be to mentor his young proteges to the top of the sport, a goal achieved in 2022 when Pecco Bagnaia won a world championship in Ducati factory colours, having graduated as world champion from the VR46 Moto2 team.
Simply put, Rossi goes racing these days for the love of the sport and the taste of the podium prosecco (something that’s all but guaranteed to happen in 2023 thanks to Marini and Bezzecchi’s testing pace). And that means that it’s going to be very difficult indeed for Yamaha to lure him away onto a machine that currently looks like it’ll make that less, not more, likely to happen.
