Carmelo Ezpeleta had implied this shortly after the first days following the certainty of seeing Suzuki escape from MotoGP through the back door. During the WSBK meeting in Estoril, it was the President of the FIM who confirmed the trend: a manufacturer is already very interested in replacing the Hamamatsu brand on the MotoGP grid. His name remains a mystery, Jorge Viegas being careful not to reveal it. However, we can already eliminate one and that's a shame...
Suzuki will leave MotoGP after the last race of this season. The Hamamatsu manufacturer will bid farewell to the paddock at the end of the Valencia Grand Prix by paying penalties for not having respected the terms of its contract with Dorna which led it to continue competing until 2026. A sad epilogue for an adventure that began eight years ago, punctuated by a drivers' world title in 2020 with Joan mir. The pill is bitter and still difficult to pass, especially for most of the members of the Suzuki ECSTAR team.
This premature departure will leave two places on the starting grid. However, Carmelo Ezpeleta and the president of the FIM, Jorge Viegas, have already hinted that there is a factory very interested in participating in MotoGP, but without giving its name. Negotiations are already underway, but we will have to wait until at least mid-summer to know what will ultimately happen to the spaces left free by Suzuki next year.
Some have thought of Kawasaki. Akashi's men were already in MotoGP a little over a decade ago, and it is true that their departure, also before the due date, was no more appreciated than that which Suzuki currently initiating… The fact remains that the greens have retreated to a WSBK where they show their know-how with the ZX-10R. Unfortunately, this hypothesis was ruled out by Guim Roda, team manager of the Kawasaki Racing Team, who spoke on the subject with crash.net.
Kawasaki explains that WSBK has a logic that MotoGP does not have
He says : " KMC (Kawasaki Motor Company) decided years ago to focus on WorldSBK for several reasons, and those reasons are still important to this day: the brand image value we achieved in World Superbike is very good. We showed the quality of Kawasaki and how seriously we work. At Kawasaki Racing Team, we believe we help sell a lot of motorcycles, not just the Ninja ».
Production motorcycles before prototypes, this is currently the motto of Kawasaki, a manufacturer that has won six of the last seven Superbike titles and is very comfortable in the WorldSBK paddock: “ in WorldSBK we use production bikes, and I think that it makes more sense to run like this than having to make a new chassis, engine and aerodynamics every year as happens in MotoGP. For Kawasaki and the KRT, it is much easier to manage our resources and connect the R&D department to the production of series motorcycles than trying to be part of a competition show with motorcycles that end customers can't buy and use on the street ", finished Stem.
Opening photo credit: The excellent MDuranDesign Instagram page
