It’s now official! Yamaha factory team in MotoGP will change sponsors starting 2019, with the team led by Lin Jarvis agreeing a new deal with Monster Energy while at the same they’ll keep Movistar as a partner.
Yamaha Racing was having a hard time negotiating with Spanish communications giant Movistar, as the main sponsor wanted to cease all connections it has with MotoGP because of poor financial results, and because Yamaha isn’t getting the results on track everyone expected.
So, Monster Energy decided to step into the negotiations table, and offered a solution that will be good for everyone.
The energy drink company will be the new main sponsor for the factory Yamaha team, while Movistar will continue do be part of the project, but as a secondary sponsor.
This way Lin Jarvis finds a great way to keep money coming in to his team, Monster Energy will continue to feature in MotoGP races after losing the partnership with the Tech3 squad (moved to KTM and will be backed by Red Bull), and Movistar still stays in MotoGP when everyone thought they would quit.
Now all we need to know is how the Yamaha prototypes will look like: will they feature black fairings with the Monster Energy logo on the side, or will they continue to be blue and just swap the white Movistar logo for the green Monster Energy logo?