Do MotoGP contracts mean anything?

Maverick Vinales, winner of 25 GPs and one World Championship, is baling out from a top factory squad, Yamaha, destination unknown. He’ll most likely end up at Aprilia, but on current form for these marques, this is from gourmet frying pan into a yet-to-flare-up fire.

“Current form”, however, is poor currency. Vinales’s own has been completely baffling. The only constant is that his team-mate Fabio Quartararo, on an identical bike, is dominating the 2021 championship.

Vinales added his ninth premier-class win at the opening round in Qatar. In eight races since then, he’s been on the front row three times, including pole at the last race at Assen, but on the podium once, second at Assen.

Just one week before in Germany, where Quartararo finished third, he qualified 21^st and finished 19^th and last. But in the process he set the fastest lap of the four Yamaha riders.

No wonder the team is baffled. From one race to the next, they don’t know what to expect from a rider who is clearly of top quality. But only sometimes.

It is not the first time the sometimes brooding figure from Figueres, home of Salvador Dali, has shown surreal behaviour. Back in 2012, with three rounds remaining and (after five wins) second in the new Moto3 championship, he had a mathematical though admittedly remote chance of winning. He arrived in Malaysia for the GP only to turn straight round and fly home again. He had already planned to quit his Honda team at the end of the year, now a meltdown meant he walked out early.

Strong-arm tactics persuaded him back for the final two races, and the next year, now riding a KTM, he took the championship before moving on up the ladder. He rebuilt his reputation as a special rider after spearheading Suzuki’s MotoGP return in 2015 and taking their first win in 2016, then joining Yamaha in 2017. Alongside Rossi, however, he shared increasing difficulties for the marque. His results became more and more erratic. To be fair, so too were those of bright new star Quartararo, in the satellite team for the past two years, and whose early 2020 title challenge went south with a series of bad races. Vinales beat him on points both years. Which clearly made the situation this year hard to bear. By the eighth round Quartararo’s four wins and two more podiums had handsomely outstripped him.

The low point came in Germany; a week later at Assen Vinales spoke bitterly of how the team, instead of building a bike to suit his style, were instead trying to redesign his style to suit Quartararo’s bike. A statement that left technical staff flabbergasted.

Still only 26, Vinales’s toys-out-the-pram moment might play in his favour. Aprilia’s all-new bike is significantly better than its previous, and he might be the rider to make it fully competitive.

Should he take the ride there, it will be at the expense of veteran former Ducati star Andrea Dovizioso, currently acting to good effect as Aprilia development rider, after taking a year’s sabbatical from the hurly-burly. His hoped-for 2021 return is now in jeopardy.

His departure has an intriguing effect on the situation at Yamaha, currently shopping frantically for riders good enough to replace not only Maverick but also Rossi. Valentino is expected to retire at the end of this season, and even if sponsorship contingencies oblige him to continue (there is some doubt whether the Aramco backing for his new VR46 team will be forthcoming for a lesser rider), the squad is already committed to Ducati.

KTM has an exemplary riders’ ladder through the classes, and almost an embarrassment of riches; Ducati – with eight bikes on next year’s grid – has already cast its net wide; Honda’s backing of junior feeder series ensures a supply of mainly Asian talent to back Marc Marquez. Suzuki, however, has no such supply chain, and nor does Yamaha. At least not since both its World Superbike riders – American Garrett Gerloff and the highly fancied young Turk Toprak Razgatlioglu – signed up to stay with the production-based series until 2022.

Amid all the speculation, however, one name has been ignored. Cameron Beaubier rode Yamaha Superbikes to no less than five increasingly dominant US AMA championships, missing only one year between 2015 and 2020, including the last three straight. He is currently running a maiden Moto2 season, and three top-ten finishes so far have impressed observers. One drawback? He is already contracted elsewhere. But then again, we all know what contracts mean in racing.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.