The moment Uccio Salucci tells Marc Marquez and HRC team members they can’t enter the Movistar Yamaha box
We are still in the aftermath of the Argentina GP, and although some of us are already looking forward for the third round of MotoGP 2018 season, in a week in Austin, Texas, there’s still those who seem to be going back to the past.
That’s the case of Italian journalist Maurizio Bruscolini, a specialist in MotoGP who writes for Italian newspaper Gazzetta Dello Sport and news portal TutomotoriWeb.
In an interview for a radio show in Italy, Bruscolini said that Yamaha management didn’t like seeing Uccio Salucci, Valentino Rossi best friend and his personal assistant, act the way he did against Marc Marquez, Alberto Puig and Emilio Alzamora, preventing them from entering the Movistar Yamaha box to apologise for what happened minutes before during the MotoGP race.
Lin Jarvis, Yamaha Racing manager, stood in the background just watching the whole scene, and did nothing but watch. This, according to Maurizio Bruscolini who quoted sources within the team, made the Yamaha management in Iwata question who’s really in charge of operations at the factory Yamaha team, and so they warned Uccio for his behavior.
Yamaha doesn’t want to see Uccio repeat this type of actions again in the future, and they’ve told him that if he does it, he won’t be able to enter the Movistar Yamaha box again.
Maurizio Bruscolini goes even further and says that right now the MotoGP paddock is living a kind of “turf war”, with two clans fighting for power: on one side we have the “VR46” clan, who dominates the paddock for a long time now, over 15 years, and on the other side we have the “MM93” clan, who is gaining strength through the dominance Marc Marquez shows on track.
As it’s normal, the clan that dominates doesn’t want to lose that power, and the clan that is trying to get that power for themselves does everything to get it. Usually these clashes stay off the track so the fans never really noticed it, but now things have grown to another level and we’re seeing riders fighting on and off track.
We need to wait for the next MotoGP round in Austin, Texas, to see if things will calm down or if the problems will continue to grow.