Yamaha Racing Managing Director Lin Jarvis says he was “surprised” to hear of RNF Racing’s decision to switch from customer M1 machines to Aprilia RS-GP’s for 2023.
The Malaysian RNF outfit announced on Friday morning at Mugello that they would be defecting from Yamaha – with which they had run as the satellite operation since 2019 in its Petronas SRT guise before switching to RNF this year – to being Aprilia’s main secondary squad for at least the next two years, seemingly leaving the Japanese manufacturer with only two machines on the MotoGP grid in 2023.
The RNF team has struggled for form in its maiden campaign since being taken over by a management consortium led by ex-SRT boss Razlan Razali, the outfit currently sitting 11th out of 12 teams in the overall points standings with a best result of tenth in the Indonesian Grand Prix.
Razali is thought be unhappy with the level if support received from Yamaha the main reason for the defection to Aprilia, the Malaysian keen to have a factory pay both of his riders salaries – something that he has now received with his deal with the Noale-based brand, as well as potentially more competitive machinery as a result of Aprilia’s recent upturn in form.
Jarvis admitted though that he was “surprised” to hear of RNF’s decision to switch as early as he did, revealing that he was taking part in a meeting with the team’s management at the time regarding its future plans.
“Of course it’s not an ideal situation, we have always had satellite teams as far back as I can remember, always more than two bikes on the grid,” said Jarvis.
“It’s never nice of course when you get to the end of a relationship, we will remain partners with RNF until the end of the season but they took the decision to move to Aprilia, and we respect that decision.
“I was a little surprised yesterday with the announcement because it was actually announced while we were in the meeting hearing their decision, which was a bit unusual but we respect their decision and we’ll move on from there.”
Jarvis added that Yamaha currently have “no alternatives” in terms of replacing RNF with another customer operation for 2023, though he felt it wouldn’t be much of an “inconvenience” initially due to the factory team not using much of RNF’s data as a result of the speed discrepancy between its riders Andrea Dovizioso and Brad Binder against Fabio Quartararo.
“We will have two bikes on the grid next year, but the reality is every other team on the grid already has an existing contract with a manufacturer so at this moment there are no alternatives, but that’s OK for us because we can focus on the factory team and getting our bike up to speed and challenging for the title, we are confident we can do that with our two riders,” continued Jarvis.
“The basic idea of having a satellite team is firstly being able to get more data from the other bikes – ideally in a similar speed zone – and the other is that you can bring in rookie riders, our factory team is an example of that because some years ago the Sepang International Circuit team brought in Franco Morbidelli and Fabio Quartararo and brought them up to speed.
“In terms of getting extra data, unfortunately this year the difference between Fabio’s speed and the ones in our satellite team is not really close, and for that reason we haven’t used a lot of data from the satellite team’s this year.
“In an ideal situation they would be closer and then we would have that benefit, but frankly looking from this year to next year I don’t really see a disadvantage.”
