It is news that have known for the past few days, ever since it became clear that Takaaki Nakagami would need surgery to repair his injured shoulder, which he hurt during a crash with Valentino Rossi earlier this year at Assen.
And now, we have official word that Johann Zarco will ride in Nakagami’s place at the LCR Honda, for the final three races for the 2019 MotoGP season.
Johann Zarco is set to replace Takaaki Nakagami for the final three races of 2019, and race the 2018-spec Honda RC213V for the Idemitsu LCR Honda team.
The news was first broken by Oriol Puigdemont of Motorsport.com, and though nobody contacted by us would comment on the news, it was later confirmed by Zarco to Thomas Baujard of the French publication Moto Journal.
The reason for the switch, according to Motorsport.com, is that Nakagami has been struggling with shoulder problems similar to those suffered by Marc Márquez, whose shoulder kept dislocating.
Nakagami is considering the same surgery as Márquez to rectify the problem, and based on the length of time Márquez took to recover from surgery, is looking at having surgery in October, rather than December, in the hope of getting a head start on rehabilitating the shoulder.
As a result, Nakagami would ride only his home Grand Prix at Motegi in Japan, before having surgery done.
This would leave Lucio Cecchinello’s LCR Honda team in need of a replacement rider. With Johann Zarco currently out of a job, after being released by KTM after Misano, Zarco would be the ideal replacement for the Japanese rider.
Doing the math ahead of the Thai GP, it would be hard to see how Marc Marquez would come out of Buriram not the 2019 MotoGP World Champion, as the Spaniard only needed to finish two points ahead of Andrea Dovizioso to clinch the title.
The problem though is that Marc Marquez is not known for taking the easy points, and instead we witnessed a masterful race from the Repsol Honda rider, as he battled his way to the front of the race.
The result was Marc Marquez taking the MotoGP World Championship title in dominating form – a fitting end to his 2019 season.
With five races to go, Marc Marquez leads Andrea Dovizioso in the MotoGP championship by 300 points to 202, a difference of 98 points.
He is within a couple of points of wrapping up the title, and looks nearly certain to do so at either Buriram in Thailand or Motegi in Japan.
What does Marquez need to do to wrap up the title in Thailand? The Repsol Honda rider will become champion if he leads Andrea Dovizioso by 100 points after the Thai Grand Prix in Buriram.
Marc Márquez is the highest paid MotoGP rider in the world. His salary is rumored to be in the region of €15 million a year, and while the numbers bandied about for rider salaries can be wildly inaccurate, there is evidence to suggest this is not far off the mark, if you will excuse the pun.
HRC is said to give riders an automatic €2 million a year raise for winning the championship, so Márquez’s five MotoGP titles in theory add up to a tidy €10 million since he entered the premier class. And that is on top of the base salary he stated out with, and any extra wages he may have negotiated for himself.
He is worth every penny of that to HRC. Without Márquez, Honda’s championship trophy cabinet would have been conspicuously bare. In the five seasons in which Márquez won the MotoGP title, the second-placed Honda rider finished third, fourth, sixth, fourth, and seventh respectively.
For a factory that regards itself as the pinnacle of motorcycling, not winning championships is not an option. The dry spell between Nicky Hayden’s 2006 title and Casey Stoner’s in 2011 is still a painful memory for Honda.
HRC have confirmed the signing of Alvaro Bautista for the 2020 WorldSBK season. The Spaniard will be leaving Ducati to join the new factory team run out of Barcelona for next year, to ride the brand new Honda CBR1000RR to be presented later this year.
There has been plenty said about the next generation of the Honda CBR1000RR, and lately the rumors have been heating up.
Solid news of an all-new machine for next first started in the WorldSBK paddock, where it was tipped that HRC would come back into the paddock with a factory team for the 2020 season – and on a new motorcycle.
Since then, we have seen some patents hinting at possible features of the new Fireblade, the most impressive of which is the idea that the 2020 Honda CBR1000RR could have active aerodynamics.
Now, we get word from our German colleagues at Speedweek that the new Honda Fireblade will debut sooner than we thought, making its arrival in October at the Tokyo Motor Show.
This means that we could see the 2020 Honda CBR1000RR as soon as October 23rd, instead of having to wait several weeks longer to see the bike debut at the EICMA show in Milan.
Alvaro Bautista will be staying in the World Superbike paddock and racing a Honda in 2020, it seems.
The plans for a new HRC-run WorldSBK team to be based in Barcelona, racing a brand new Honda CBR1000RR, put an end to any speculation that Bautista might be heading back to MotoGP to take the place of Johann Zarco at KTM for next year.
Rumors and reports from Portimao are solidifying the story that Bautista will be staying in WorldSBK. A thorough piece on German-language publication Speedweek set out Honda’s World Superbike plans for 2020, including the plans for a new bike.
What are you to do if you find yourself stuck on a bike you know you can’t ride? On a bike that you are convinced is trying to hurt you, and that you keep falling off of every time you try to push?
The obvious answer is you try to leave as soon as possible. But that simple answer hides a host of factors that make leaving not as easy as it looks. The cases of Jorge Lorenzo and Johann Zarco illustrate that very well.
First of all, why would a rider want to leave a factory ride? The pay is good, rarely less than seven figures. Riders have a chance to shape the bike and point development in a direction that suits them.
They are treated, if not like royalty, then at least like nobility: transport is arranged and rearranged pretty much at their whim, picked up at their front doors before a race and deposited there again afterward. The pressure is high, but in a factory team, they do everything they can to take the strain and let their riders concentrate on riding.
That is little consolation when the going gets really tough. When you are struggling to get inside the top ten, despite giving your all to try to make the bike go faster.
When you are crashing at twice, three times your normal rate. When factories are slow to bring updates to the bike. Or even worse, when they bring boxes and boxes of new parts, and none of those parts make much of a difference to your results.
You would think, with only two riders not yet signed up for 2020, and both of those (Jack Miller and Takaaki Nakagami) saying they are just working out the details, that there would not be much drama over contracts in the MotoGP paddock.
Things are not quite the same in the WorldSBK paddock, where Alvaro Bautista’s reign of terror has come to a very premature end, opening all sorts of speculation for the 2020 season.
Those two strands are starting to come together after Brno, amplified by moves in Moto2 and WorldSBK. The rumors are flying, some more sensible than others. And many of them are very much in the category of insanity.
At the core of these rumors is Jorge Lorenzo, and his extended absence from the MotoGP paddock due to the injuries sustained in his crashes at the Barcelona test and practice at Assen.
Since then, the rumor mill has gone into overdrive, with questions over whether Lorenzo will continue with Repsol Honda or try to do something else.
Over the summer break, there were rumors he would retire, and the latest rumor has him going back to Ducati in some form or another.
It’s currently the long WorldSBK summer break, which means that the superbike paddock has more than enough time to wheel and deal…and then of course gossip.
There are a number of rumors coming for 2020, but none of them are nearly as good as the talk about Alvaro Bautista jumping ship from Ducati, to the factory-backed Honda squad.
That news comes along with the rumor that Honda will have a new superbike for the 2020 model year, which is something we have seen speculated about for some time.