Cycle News

VOL. 50 ISSUE 46 NOVEMBER 19, 2013 and we shall concentrate this entirely in Noale [the site of Aprilia's R&D headquarters]. And with an extraordinary rider like Marco Melandri here beside me, I believe that success will be much easier to obtain." Before 2011, when he moved to World Superbike, Melandri spent eight seasons in MotoGP, racing for Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki and Ducati, scoring five race wins and finishing second in the championship in 2005 on the Team Gresini satellite Honda RC211V, defeating the factory Repsol Hondas in doing so. While Aprilia test rider Alex Hoffman has had his contract renewed for another year, but with Melandri engaged in trying to regain the World Superbike title for Aprilia in 2014, it remains to be seen which rider will be tasked with the role of taking the company's new MotoGP project forward. One candidate who immediately raised his hand in the wake of Colaninno's announcement is the now retired Max Biaggi, who won three 250cc GP World Championships in 1994-96 for Aprilia, followed by two World Superbike titles in 2010/2012, and who now works as a TV commentator. "I hope that Colaninno will remember the promise he made to me a year ago," said Biaggi in a statement on hearing the news. "This takes me back to when Aprilia was a big name in Grand Prix racing, when I alone helped put them on the map – it was a fairytale success. I think both they and Ducati will experience some difficulty in becoming competitive against the Japanese, but we shall have to see. Having said that, I'm a little surprised they should have made this announcement so early, three years in advance." And that early announcement very likely gives a clue to the motive behind what indeed appears to be a hastily-arrived at decision, which can surely only have been reached in just the previous three weeks, since Dall'Igna resigned to move to Ducati. It seems inconceivable that Aprilia's technical guru (whose desire to return to GP racing officially, not just in the CRT/Open class, is well documented) would have left Aprilia had he known that Colaninno had decided to return as a full-on factory team to MotoGP. Aprilia left MotoGP at the end of the 2004 season, after racing its fast but ferocious RS Cube with its Cosworth-designed three-cylinder engine unsuccessfully for three seasons. Colaninno publicly envisaged an abortive return for 2008, but in the end Aprilia opted to focus on winning the World Superbike title as a means of promoting sales of its new RSV4 – an operation that has seen victory on the racetrack unmatched by success in the showroom. Yet in spite of the catastrophic decline in competitivity of its MotoGP effort since Casey Stoner left (not helped by an equally di- P21 Briefly... last week in Northern California. "Thanks for all the kind get well wishes," Hayden wrote on his Twitter feed. "A bit bored with right hand out of action, but all good." A screw had worked its way loose in Hayden's arm and was digging into this radius bone, causing discomfort. sastrous 2013 World Superbike season with the radical new Panigale 1199), Ducati has continued to post record sales of its streetbikes. It's very likely this is the reason that Colaninno has been convinced by his advisors to announce that in 2016 Aprilia will return to the MotoGP paddock. Trying to impart some degree of sporting luster to the brand by participating in MotoGP - with what they hope will be some degree of success - almost certainly represents Aprilia's entry to the last chance saloon. Failure to generate a pickup in sales of what are, however, widely agreed to be an outstanding range of models, from the RSV4 sportbike to the Caponord adventure tourer, the Tuono naked bike to the Dorsoduro streetfighter, would very likely spell the end of Piaggio's underwriting Aprilia's continued existence. So what's next? Well, the one thing any student of the Italian motorcycle industry during the past 30 years has come to realize is that you must never take anything for granted, and instead expect the unexpected. Alan Cathcart

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