In the run-up to the Indonesian GP, after Pol and Aleix Espargaró crossed the finish line third and fourth in the previous race in Qatar, separated by 9 tenths, they asked the eldest of the Granollers brothers who was going to be the first the two to achieve a victory in the queen class. “It’s going to be me,” Aleix replied confidently.
Until Sunday, Espargaró had accumulated 199 races in MotoGP, to 139 of his brother Pol, without stepping on the highest step of the podium, a streak that the Aprilia rider put an end to, highlighting the work of Noale’s house, With this victory, they finally leave behind the label of a losing team that has haunted them since their hasty return to the first class in 2015, a year earlier than they had planned, teaming up with Fausto Gresini .
The arrival of the Piaggio Group brand in MotoGP was given by Gresini’s need to have motorcycles for its private structure. Aprilia had set itself the goal of returning to the World Championship in 2016 as a factory, but the regulations of the championship at that time forced any manufacturer that wanted to enter MotoGP to do so associated with one of the teams with a place in ownership.
With some improvisation, Gresini and Aprilia signed an agreement to start the 2015 season with Marco Melandri and Alvaro Bautista as riders, Fausto himself as sports manager and Romano Albesiano as technical chief, beginning a relationship that ended abruptly in December 2020, when both parties announced their final separation for 2022.
Aleix Espargaró, Aprilia Racing, Jorge Martín, Pramac Racing
Photo by: MotoGP
The arrival of Massimo Rivola at the end of 2018 from Formula 1, where he held sports management positions at Minardi, Toro Rosso and Ferrari, was a turning point in Aprilia’s history. The Italian executive began to cut ties with Gresini, strengthened the technical structure of Noale’s racing department, hired staff with experience in F1 and bet on aerodynamics.
“The arrival of Rivola raised the level of Aprilia, it became a more professional structure and brought in experienced technicians, as well as an aerodynamicist from F1, to work in a field in which the rivals were betting very heavily,” he explains to Motorsport . .com a house engineer.
In 2021, Rivola focused on team management, while Albesiano did so solely and exclusively on the technical development of the RS GP, with the freedom of being the only team to enjoy full concessions in the championship, a condition that they will lose this year with one more victory, or two podiums.
The third leg of the project, and perhaps the most important, has been the tireless work of Aleix Espargaró in the development of the bike. The Catalan arrived at Aprilia in 2017, after unexpectedly losing his seat, for him, at Suzuki.
His first years in the Noale household were not easy. “It has been a very difficult road,” he acknowledged this Sunday. “There was a turning point a couple of years ago.”
“But if there is one thing that is certain, it is that I have never thrown in the towel, I have always worked and I have always believed in this project no matter how bad the results were, I think I have shown Aprilia that they have never had a more hard-working rider than me, and I am very happy that we have achieved it”.
A job that was not always supported by the recognition that Aleix believed he deserved, constantly seeing himself compared to other riders who arrived at Aprilia.
“Every time a new teammate arrives, people think he will go faster than me. And when another one arrives, the same. Bradley Smith came from being fifth in the world with Yamaha. Then Scott Redding, who was a Moto2 champion, or Andrea Iannone, who had won races with Ducati… I have beaten very fast riders”, Aleix recalled in Indonesia two weeks ago, when he was still the only rider on the MotoGP grid who had never he had won a race in the World Championship.
It was there, precisely, where Aprilia communicated to the Spaniard its intention to renew him for the next season, an offer that the rider had been waiting for for months and that took a long time to arrive, so much so that it had created some discomfort in Aleix.
A continuity that now seems clear, but that four years ago made the pilot himself doubt.
“Everything I get is thanks to my wife. The stability it gives me is brutal. Some time ago I told her: ‘Laura, I’m not happy, I finish 18th in every race and I’m hurting myself, let’s do something else’. And I talked about it with Aprilia, but Rivola arrived and Noale changed a lot”, confessed the rider this Sunday.
The winner Aleix Espargaró, Aprilia Racing with the team
Photo by: Aleix Espargaro
It was a complex moment for Aleix and his family, with the birth of his twins, Max and Mia, and the girl’s delicate health problems.
“It brought us closer together. For any parent, their family is the most important thing, but in my case even more so, I am a very passionate person, I am super close to them, they are my strength and motivation”.
“If the twins had not been born, and without a doubt it has been difficult with my daughter, perhaps I would not be here, I would not have continued running because I would not have had that positive energy that they transmit to me. Especially the first and second year after birth, which were very difficult for me in Aprilia”, admitted an emotional Aleix.
The arrival of his good friend Maverick Viñales has been another motivating factor for Espargaró and for Aprilia. For Aleix it is one more challenge to fight against a world champion (Moto3) and race winner with Yamaha.
At Aprilia, with the arrival of a top rider, they thought that the level of results would rise and the almost exclusive dependency they had on Espargaró would decrease, calling in other leading riders who, until the arrival of Maverick, had systematically ruled out Noale’s project for not considering it a winner. Andrea Dovizioso made it very clear, who signed a succulent tester contract to do two tests and, however, declined to become a rider of the brand to go to the Yamaha satellite team.
“For Espargaró there have been two turning points in recent months, the Silverstone podium (2021), where he unlocked himself and saw that he could fight to win, and the Mandalika weekend, fifteen days ago,” says a technician from Aprilia who writes these lines. “We changed the setup of the bike and everything improved. In Qatar, Aleix gave it his all, the maximum, and could only finish fourth. Something had to be changed to go one step further, and with the set-up in Indonesia, we did it”.
That opened the eyes of Rivola and Aprilia, Viñales could not raise the level, he rode and rode and on Sunday morning he asked the technicians to mount Aleix’s setup, which reinforced Granollers’s, even more, as a center of the project.
Who will be the first of the Espargaró family to win a MotoGP race? “It’s going to be me,” Aleix said. What he did not say, then, is that he had already found the key, that at that moment he already knew that the Aprilia was going to win. As it has been.
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Photo by: Aleix Espargaro
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