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Maverick Vinales

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The dark horse in the 2022 MotoGP Championship has to be the Aprilia RS-GP race bike. With a budget that is a fraction of the other factories, Aprilia has been able to evolve the RS-GP each season into a sharper weapon – albeit, slowly.

The Italian squad made big steps in the 2021 season, however, and Aprilia is keen to keep that momentum moving forward and see Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Vinales on the top rankings of the score sheets.

Taking one look at the 2022-spec bike, which was on hand for the team’s season unveiling and photography, and we can already see the evolutions in place for the coming season, and motions are under way for a breakout year.

With the bikes all crated up and shipped to Indonesia, and the entire paddock flown to Mandalika on the island of Lombok (bar those stuck in quarantine in Malaysia after testing positive for COVID-19), there is time to look back at the Sepang MotoGP test.

Because this year is so different to previous years in a number of ways, I am breaking it down into two parts.

First, some general points that apply to the test itself and across several or all manufacturers, and later in the week, a breakdown manufacturer by manufacturer.

We have been fortunate this year compared to 2020. Last year, we had repeat-races at five circuits, making up ten of the fourteen MotoGP rounds held.

In 2021, the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic has improved to the point that MotoGP managed to visit three different continents, needing to return to the same circuit only three times.

Six races out of eighteen is far from perfect, but much better than the situation in 2020.

Maverick Viñales has elected not to race at the US round of MotoGP at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin.

The Spaniard has decided to take the time to come to terms with the death of his cousin, Dean Berta Viñales, as a result of a crash in the WorldSSP300 race at Jerez on Saturday.

Dean Berta Viñales rode in the team run by Maverick’s father, Angel, and which carries Maverick’s logo.

Friday at Misano was fun, if a complete waste of time. Ideal conditions for about 35 minutes of FP1, then the deluge came, flooding the track and putting an end to any idea of improvement.

A rainy afternoon – though not quite as rain-sodden as the end of FP1 – meant it was impossible to better the times from this morning.

Which left Maverick Viñales at the top of the timesheets. A remarkable achievement, given this is just his second race on the Aprilia after his dramatic separation from the Yamaha team.

Does this mean that Viñales is now the favorite for the win at Misano? Even Maverick Viñales doesn’t think so.

These past two pandemic-stricken season have been strange years for me as a journalist. Instead of heading to race tracks almost every weekend, I have been sat at home, staring at a computer screen to talk to riders.

There have been ups and downs: on the plus side, we journalists get to talk to more riders than when we were at the track, because computers make it possible to switch from one rider to another with a couple of mouse clicks, rather than sprint through half the paddock from race truck to hospitality and back again.

Maverick Viñales has completed the first two days of his Aprilia career, riding the RS-GP for the first time at the Misano circuit. The Spaniard was very happy afterwards, in no small part because he was also fast.

He ended the day with a fastest lap of 1’32.4, he told Catalan journalist Damià Aguilar. Earlier, Lucio Lopez of MotoRaceNation, present at the track, reported that Viñales had set a lap of 1’32.8 on a soft tire with 8 laps on.

The fallout from Maverick Viñales’ precipitate departure from the Monster Energy Yamaha team continues to reshape 2022, and perhaps even 2021.

First, Aprilia announced on the Monday after Austria that Viñales would be racing for them alongside Aleix Espargaro in 2022.

Then, at the end of that week, Yamaha announced they would be terminating their contract with Viñales with immediate effect.

Maverick Viñales’ decision to leave Yamaha at the end of the 2021 season raised all sorts of questions.

Who would take his place in the factory Monster Energy Yamaha team? Can Franco Morbidelli be bought out of his contract with the Petronas SRT team? And if Morbidelli goes to the factory team, who do Petronas take to replace Morbidelli?

Valentino Rossi added another layer of complexity to those questions at the Styria Grand Prix by announcing he would be retiring from MotoGP at the end of this year. Now, Yamaha had not one, but two seats to fill.