Takaaki Nakagami will be staying with the LCR Honda team for 2020, HRC and the LCR Honda team have officially confirmed.
After a long period of negotiation, Honda and Nakagami have finally reached terms that will see the Japanese rider staying in Lucio Cecchinello’s team for another 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.
KTM has decided to replace Johann Zarco effective immediately. From Aragon until the end of 2019, current KTM test rider Mika Kallio will take the place of the Frenchman in the factory Red Bull KTM team.
Though the decision comes as a surprise to the outside world, it makes sense from the perspective of KTM. Zarco has announced his intention to leave at the end of the season, and given his options are limited for 2020, is looking at becoming a test rider, and has been linked to a possible vacancy at Yamaha.
With so much work happening on the KTM RC16, and a constant flow of new parts in the garage, KTM has decided it is better to have test rider Mika Kallio on the bike than keeping Johann Zarco.
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.
Episode 113 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and in it we see Neil Morrison and David Emmett come together on the microphones, as we discuss the happenings at the Autrian GP at the Red Bull Ring.
In this episode, there is no shortage of topics to cover – thanks largely in part to KTM releasing a bevy of announcements at its home round.
Of course, before the start of the Austrian round, there was talk about the Repsol Honda garage, and whether Jorge Lorenzo would be departing it. By the end of the weekend, the conversation was still about Repsol Honda, but instead focused on the last-turn loss that was handed to them by Ducati Corse.
The Austrian round of MotoGP has been a weekend of bombshells. After the news that Ducati and Jorge Lorenzo had been in talks to replace Jack Miller in the Pramac squad before the weekend, on Sunday night it emerged that Johann Zarco asked to be released from his contract with KTM for 2020.
The Frenchman has long been unhappy with the Austrian factory, sometimes very publicly so. Since the moment he jumped on the KTM RC16, he has struggled to adapt to the bike.
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.
Though empty seats are limited for the 2020 MotoGP season, in recent weeks there has been some movement to fill those vacancies.
The moves have mostly been unsurprising, but then with so few seats available, the chances of something unexpected happening are very slim.
Just before the Sachsenring, we saw Danilo Petrucci keeping his seat alongside Andrea Dovizioso in the factory Ducati team for the 2020 season, a fully expected move since the Italian’s victory at Mugello back in early June.
That leaves Jack Miller in the Pramac Ducati team for another year, though that deal is not yet signed.
A deal is close, however. “We’re fighting over pennies now,” Miller said on Sunday night in Germany. Miller will have a Ducati Desmosedici GP20 at his disposal, the same as his teammate Pecco Bagnaia, but there were still a few financial details to be ironed out.
“It more or less should be done, I got some information today. So hopefully we can get it done before we get back at Brno and put all that stuff behind us and just focus on riding.”
Episode 101 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and in it we see Neil Morrison and David Emmett on the microphones, as we discuss the happenings at the Spanish GP at Jerez.
As usual, the guys cover the on track action at the race, as well as the goings on behind the scenes in the paddock.
Special attention is given to Marc Marquez’s victory at Jerez, as well as the meltdown of Fabio Quartararo, who became the youngest MotoGP pole-sitter ever, and looked to have a promising race ahead of him.
Another day, and another factory MotoGP team debut. This week’s entry is actually a two-fer from the KTM camp, as we see in their race livery both the factory-back Red Bull KTM team debut (Pol Espargaro & Johann Zarco), as well as the factory-supported KTM Tech3 squad (Hafizh Syahrin & Miguel Oliveira).
KTM will be looking to make big steps this year in the MotoGP Championship, as the team stalled on its progress last year. This is part of the reason for a two-pronged approach in the paddock, and for the Tech3 outfit getting substantial support and involvement in the development of the KTM RC16 race bike.
