In 2020, finding himself without a seat after eight years with Ducati, Noale approached Andrea Dovizioso to show his interest in working alongside him in 2021. Despite private tests in the spring, the adventure did not progress positively, due to the fact that the Italian preferred not to participate in his project as a test pilot.
It was as a full-time rider that Dovizioso wanted to return to MotoGP, and his wish came true in the middle of the 2021 season, when he replaced Franco Morbidelli in the Yamaha satellite team.
A year later, Aprilia leads the teams’ championship thanks to the performances of Aleix Espargaró, who achieved five podium finishes and also gave the manufacturer a first victory.
On the other side of the qualifying sheet, RNF is penultimate in the team championship and Andrea Dovizioso has only managed to get into the points four times, with 11th as the best result.
Inevitably, the idea that the Italian might regret his refusal to join Aprilia , even as a test rider, is in fact essential in the face of figures that speak for themselves. However, in his eyes, the symbiosis between Aleix Espargaró and the RS-GP is comparable to what he experienced at Ducati with the Desmosedici.
Faced with a bike he had considered “rare” in the first place, he doubts he could have been competitive, a skepticism compounded by his poor performance on the Yamaha this season.
“Aleix is impressive and therefore he deserves it. He has the bike totally under control,” he explained. “In my opinion, he rides it very strangely. That’s what I discovered when I tried the bike last year, but I immediately knew that the base was very good and the bike was very competitive. If you look at how he rides, he just uses the back part”.
“The bike has good grip and Aleix understood perfectly how to brake, he never makes any mistakes […] He has a fast pace and that means he knows exactly what he’s doing, it’s not just attacking and that’s it. And currently this mix is bomb “.
Although he believed in the Aprilia project, Dovizioso did not see how to achieve that “mix” rider/bike necessary to achieve great things.
“If you go back to my interviews from when I tested the Aprilia, I said that the project is very well designed, [the bike] has a lot of grip, good power and the base is very good. Between a very good base and fighting for the title, You have to work a lot and it always depends on that mix between the rider and the bike. For me, Aleix is very strong at the moment because he has riding characteristics that work exactly with that bike.”
Saying he was “very happy” for Aprilia, Dovizioso believes Aleix Espargaró is a serious contender for the world title this season.
“He can fight for the title because he doesn’t make mistakes and he’s always there. Every year MotoGP has its story. I was competitive with Ducati during Marc’s years [laughs] and now MotoGP has changed, for many reasons: technically, the tires, riders, a lot of things have changed and they make us race very differently on the weekends, but that is the evolution of everything we experience, even in MotoGP.”
