With the factory teams of Ducati and Honda finally announcing their lineups, there aren’t a lot of free seats available, especially if a rider wants to be on a factory MotoGP bike. Andrea Iannone is one of those riders, and the current Suzuki rider, after being linked with a return to Ducati and even to take Dani Pedrosa’s place in Repsol Honda, is going to be officially announced as the new rider for the Gresini Aprilia team.
The deal is done, according to many Italian news portals, and all that is missing is the Aprilia press release being sent to make it official.
Andrea Iannone will ride for the Gresini Aprilia team for the next two seasons, until the end of 2020, and will be riding the RS-GP prototype alongside Spaniard Aleix Espargaró, who also renewed with the team until 2020.
For Aprilia, this means the rider lineup will be stronger than what they have right now. Aleix Espargaró is the one who manages to get the Italian bike on the Top 10 in many races, while Scott Redding isn’t having the best of times with the team.
For Iannone, this deal means that he will continue to be a factory rider, and even though he knows the Aprilia isn’t quite at the same level as the best MotoGP prototypes from Yamaha, Honda and Ducati, he knows that the Noale factory will do everything they can to solve the problems the bike has.
That being said, Romano Albesiano, Aprilia Racing director, knows that by signing Iannone the brand will need to do an extra effort to bring the RS-GP up to speed.
Aprilia Racing will need to improve the bike’s reliability if they want to give Aleix Espargaró and Andrea Iannone any chances of getting near the top of MotoGP, and with that in mind, Albesiano already promised that Aprilia will make a greater investment in their MotoGP project – that means Aprilia’s World Superbike effort will suffer even more with this decision.
We expect the official press release from Aprilia Racing confirming Andrea Iannone to be made public in the next few hours.
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