The first step for the official announcement of the new Yamaha satellite team in MotoGP has been taken, and officially confirmed by a statement issued by Yamaha Racing, and from 2019 until the end of the 2021 season the Japanese manufacturer will lease two Yamaha M1’s to the Sepang International Circuit (SIC) team, who will join forces with the Angel Nieto Team on this task.
SIC will run the two MotoGP entries from the Angel Nieto Team, and Jorge “Aspar” Martinez will become the sporting consultant of the new satellite Yamaha team.
There’s no word about who will be the team’s sponsor, but it is highly likely to be Petronas, who already supports the efforts of SIC in the Moto2 class.
As for the riders, Franco Morbidelli, who currently rides for Marc VDS and is a student of Valentino Rossi’s academy, is set to join the SIC Angel Nieto Team (or should we call it SIC Petronas?), and his teammate will be either Dani Pedrosa or Moto2 rider Fabio Quartararo.
Pedrosa announced that he already made a decision regarding his future, and he will confirm what he’s going to do, during the German GP, in a week’s time. Quartararo on the other hand is a rising talent, and already showed in Moto2 that he is capable of great things.
In the statement issued by Yamaha Racing there’s no word about what prototypes this new team will lease for three years. Yamaha has always been reluctant to give Tech3 a factory spec M1, and things seem to point to that still being the case with SIC and Angel Nieto Team. But other manufacturers are leasing factory prototypes to non-factory teams, and that might make Yamaha Racing change its mind.