Kawasaki - maybe back in...?

 Spanish media claim Team Aspar may be close to facilitating a deal.
Rumor further claims Aspar has a lot of interest in Hopkins, but is
very lukewarm about Melandri (he has a 250cc prodigy-protege-favorite
in-house with Debon, tough break for Melandri). Needless to say, Dorna
desperately wheeling and dealing to keep Kawa in.

Does anyone know who these Dorna mavericks truly are? It's some weird
faceless mafia, isn't it? Kinda weird when it's always "Dorna this,
Dorna that" but it seems the guys themselves try to stay quite low
key... There are now leadership names or anything that are easily
accessible... strange organization.

 pablo wrote:

Noyes' take a Speed this week reiterates the prior round for Team Aspar
on the 3rd Kawi: "Martinez has acknowledged that he was contacted by
Ezpeleta and that he is studying the possibility. His first reaction was
that it would be difficult to find additional sponsorship for a team
featuring an Italian (Marco Melandri) and an American (John Hopkins). An
earlier attempt to obtain, again with Dorna's encouragement, a third
Kawasaki to be run by the Aspar structure failed when Kawasaki insisted
on inserting Shinya Nakano as the rider. Aspar would only consider a
Spanish rider, and among the riders under consideration at that time
were Álex Debon (who won two GPs and finished fourth in the 2008 World
250 Championship), Fonsi Nieto (who won one race and finished sixth in
the 2008 World Superbike Championship), and Ángel Rodriguez (the 2008
Spanish Supersport Champion).

"It looks like there is some serious horse-trading already going on in
advance of the January 7 MSMA 'Crisis Summit.' In order for Aspar to be
able to bring in a Spanish rider and Spanish sponsorship, there are
negotiations taking place between the Scot and San Carlo Gresini teams,
both running satellite Hondas, to place Melandri on the Scot team..."

Here's an earlier statement from Martinez:

"At the moment I'm on vacation with my family," Martinez told Gazzetta
dello Sport. "However, since it has been known that Kawasaki was not
taking part next season, my vacations have practically finished. For the
last two days I've been on the phone with Dorna. They called me first.
We are in contact and talks to buy out the two Kawasakis have started.
For sure I'm very interested in MotoGP. It's a project that was already
in my plans. Now there is this opportunity which I don't yet know with
certainty whether it will come to be and how. From my part there is the
will to talk. We'll see."

Kawasaki already had John Hopkins and Marco Melandri under contract for
2009. The American's personal sponsorship from energy drink company
Monster could prove valuable to any team taking on the Kawasakis, and
although Martinez was unwilling to discuss rider plans, he hinted that
he would also be happy to retain Melandri.

"The matter regarding riders isn't a priority at the moment," said
Martinez. "I certainly wouldn't have any problem with Melandri. In fact,
he's a rider I've always liked very much."

Kropotkin thinks Melandri is likely headed for a Honda lease team,
although which is quite up in the air. On Sunday he reported: "Initial
reports by the Italian sports paper Gazzetta dello Sport suggested that
Kawasaki could hand over the team to Jorge Martinez, who would run the
team. But though it was thought that this would include both John
Hopkins and Marco Melandri, Italian site GPOne.com is reporting that the
Aspar team may only field a single Kawasaki in 2009, not two. The
problem, unsurprisingly, is money. Though Jorge Martinez would
effectively get the Kawasaki team for nothing, that would still leave
the Spaniard to find a large sum of money for the running costs of the
teams. The 3 million euros in Monster Energy sponsorship is just about
sufficient to cover John Hopkins' salary, and would leave the Aspar team
to find both Marco Melandri's salary - which despite his poor year in
2008 is not likely to be cheap - as well as the funds to cover running
the team for the entire year."

But then he quotes Martinez on Monday: "For me, the most important thing
is a Spanish rider, but I also need some guarantees from Kawasaki about
the bikes for 2009, such as the development of the bike, the supply of
parts, and the maintenance."

The talk on Hopkins had turned to speculation on a move to Tech3,
replacing Edwards and bringing along Monster money. But that seemed like
classic rumor mill stuff, Edwards has a signed contract with Yamaha and
  Monster has broad contracts with Kawasaki that don't tie to Hopkins.
Then the rumors started about Hopper to American Kawasaki in the AMA,
which are an even greater stretch. I have yet to see anything that
suggests Martinez is high on Hopkins at all.

What no one seems to be talking about is the Monster contract - they
have a deal with Kawi to run as the major sponsor on the bikes, and one
assumes Kawi can't just walk away from that in order to give Aspar a
clean fairing that he can fill with a new Spanish sponsor baited by his
new Spanish rider.


I don't know about that, Ezpeleta seems to maintain a very high profile,
is very much the face of Dorna.

 
I'm tempted to say that the problem here is an inability to get major
sponsorship for the second tier teams. I didn't realise Monster were
putting money into the team as well as into Hopkins.

So what about Suzuki. If Rizla are pulling out, are the factory funding
the team this year?

--
Julian Bond  E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com  M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
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 Julian Bond wrote:

From what I've seen in the past, Rizla was only paying about $2M to
Suzuki, which is chicken feed for a full failring on a factory team
(compared to the estimated $30M paid by Phillip Morris to Ducati). If
so, my guess is it's not all that hard to absorb. Hopkins said they
were offering him about the same as Kawi was last year, which is
estimated at $4M, and it has been stated by Spies that Suzuki didn't
sign him because he was asking for too much, and what he was asking
was for what he made this year at Yosh, estimated at about $2M (he
said he couldn't figure out why a company could afford to pay him X to
race in the AMA, but could not afford to pay him X to ride in MotoGP,
which is a good question). So it seems Suzuki has likely squeezed more
than Rizla's contribution out of rider salaries already, at least
hypothetically.