Aprilia’s growth in MotoGP continues. In 2022, the team separated from Gresini to have a fully factory team, and last year, they had a satellite team for the first time.
Along the way, in the last two years, the project achieved its first wins, with experienced riders Aleix Espargaró and Maverick Viñales as spearheads on track.
Massimo Rivola is the team leader, serving as the CEO of Aprilia Racing. He has been a key figure in the team’s progress.
In an interview, which you can read here, the Italian evaluated the 2023 season, projecting the immediate future with ambitions for this year, and discussing the potential direction of MotoGP in the coming years.
What is the overall assessment of your year?
A season with too many ups and downs. A season with super emotion like Silverstone and obviously Barcelona. A season with a lot of regrets and lost occasions to perform. A season where we planned to be the second constructor, and we are not.
I would say mainly because of the starts and the sprint races, because if I see that point, and Binder in particular in the sprint races. When you get that kind of a start, you have an advantage.
I think in terms of bikes we are very similar in terms of level. We knew that Ducati had an advantage, and that is worrying for the show in years to come. With eight bikes and with Marc [Marquez], it will be interesting to see for sure, but a pain for others.
We are not happy, but to be honest it’s good not to be happy when you win races and you do podiums. It means that expectations were high, for a reason, and it means that we have worked well the past few seasons.
It’s not easy even to keep this trend, because when performance is getting high and the level of MotoGP is already very high, I was hoping that the last few years it was growing so much to make an easy life for us, but unfortunately our competitors are not sleeping at all.
Good things are that Aleix has confirmed that still he can be very, very fast with this bike. Bad things with him are that he has been a bit up and down too much. Too many crashes, I would say, compared to the previous season in particular.
Regarding Maverick, again some ups and downs, but I will say that generally he is getting on with the bike. He has the bike in his hands. What is missing is clearly the victory, not just to win a race but to take the last doubts out of him. It’s that kind of thing that then you can ride more relaxed, with a bit more confidence. The kind of thing that helps a rider’s confidence in general.
Most of the time, we see Aprilia the winner of Friday, which is absolutely useless. It’s disappointing even more because it raises your expectations at the beginning of the weekend. You say ‘OK, this weekend will be good’ but too many times it was not. For us this should also be a way for us to think if we are working in the right way or not, and maybe we have to think twice about that.
But also, with this kind of rule where in FP2 you need to have a sort of qualifying, you are scared about not being in Q2. Just working for the Sunday race, maybe you can do it if your bike level is very high, like Pecco – we saw him lost sometimes on Friday and then winning the race. Or if you have a start like KTM where you can recover three rows very easily. But if you work normally, this is the outcome.
The first year for us with the satellite team, and I would say also a bit unlucky. We could say to Miguel that we expected more in the last few races, but too many things have happened around him, personally as well. He has just had a kid, another son, and we’re happy for him but these are things that even if the rider says ‘I’m fine’ you still don’t know if something is worrying them and losing a couple of tenths. And if you lose a couple of tenths, you lose two rows.
Happy about Raul, honestly. I see him now riding the bike, and now it’s our turn to make the bike more reliable and help him to find performance. But I’ll tell you that I expect him to be someone who will disturb the other Aprilias a lot next year, and this was the target.
I hope in the future to use more the satellite team more for development. The more that the performance is growing, the less difference there is between one bike and the following one from the year before, and the easier it becomes to get information that is useful to everybody.
I didn’t find a title sponsor, and this is something that is difficult to understand for me. In the last few years, we have had a lot of visibility, our image is good, we have the coolest bike on the track with the coolest colours. Our image is bloody good, and it’s good to see a huge Aprilia logo to remind everyone that it is an Aprilia, but I’m happy also to put someone else’s name if they are paying a lot of money!
That will help us to grow. We have the full support of Piaggio Group, and I have to say that thanks to them we have reached this point. But now it’s time for us to find money. That’s an area where I am not performing personally, but the best way to do it is to keep pushing to get performance from the bike and keep knocking on the right doors at the right moment.
I think 2024 will be very interesting because OK Marc, but also what this will mean as a chain effect in the rider market for 2025 and 2026. At the moment, I would be happy to be stable because I think stability brings performance, but let’s see which kind of real possibility we will have.
I don’t know right now and I’m not really thinking deeply about it, just watching with the antennas high. But the first four months of next year will be busy for everyone in my position and all the other teams. Obviously the target is to be the real alternative to Ducati, so we need to be better, to have a faster bike, and to show that we are strong.
The disappointment of the season is that if I think really deeply about every single weekend, we lost so many points for one reason or another one that maybe a paying off of the first half of the season last year where everything was going right and Aleix was always there.
I tell you, I expect a lot from Maverick next year in particular because this is the first year that he has had his crew chief, but the crew chief didn’t know Aprilia and was coming from a totally different bike. I think one year of experience of every single track together will pay in next year’s performance.
But the worst thing we can do is create high expectations, because high expectations will kill us. The high expectations of this year was a negative factor for all of us, and we didn’t manage it properly. From my point of view, from the riders, from everyone.
If you had told us a couple of years ago to do this kind of championship with victories, a win starting from P13 I would have signed immediately – but now I don’t feel happy. It’s good to have this feeling, but it would be better to have more.
How do you fix the problems of 2023?
The worst thing that we can do is overreact when things are not going right. If you look at the first half of the season, we were really underperforming – or not underperforming, but underachieving results. We stayed calm, we kept pushing, and then we had two amazing victories.
Now we are again downfaced, with a horrible Sepang that still we need to understand. But coming from Thailand where the performance was actually not bad at all where we were supposed to be really shit, the bike is getting better overall everywhere. Austria used to be a shitty track for us and now Maverick was almost doing the pole position.
We can see that if we put everything in the right things, we can be fast. It’s a lot about details, and we need to work more carefully about the details. The guys that are regularly beating us, I would say is just Ducati, and I come back again that they have a huge advantage with eight bikes.
Eight fantastic bikes, but next year will be worse because the bike that is world champion will be the worst bike and will be ridden by Marc. The rookie of Ducati next year will be Marc Marquez, and that doesn’t sound good for all the other competitors! It’s a difficult job, but we have no chance other than making a better bike and stopping to make mistakes.
How do you fix that? Teamwork pays a lot, so we need to remember what we did so far and understand, really understand, why we were not fast in some races. If the rider is in the right environment, it can make the difference. So that extra, to compensate for the gap, can come from the rider. I am convinced about that.
I was accused that we do not have the good riders, and I do not agree. I think that we have a mix of very different kinds of talent, including Miguel and Raul who next year I expect to be stronger. They were coming from a different situation.
OK, Raul with almost no experience , but Miguel with the experience of victories. He is still the KTM rider with the most victories, and that is not by chance. It’s through work and talent and getting the feeling of squeezing the bike to get the most from it.
The first bike to cross the first corner in the first race was Miguel, in Portimao. Then, it’s difficult – we saw Enea, and I was so happy to see him winning again because it means you can build the confidence back again. That was a message also to Miguel. It will come. He has all the possibility, and it will come.
It’s also on us to help more the satellite team. Consider also that RNF didn’t know the bike, and that the crew chief of Raul didn’t know the class, it’s all about experience. You don’t invent seconds from one year to the next, but even if you don’t change anything in the bike, with the same people, the same crew next year, you will be faster because of experience.
The next bike must be better, abd I have no reason to think it won’t be according to the past, so the question is how will KTM be better, how will Ducati be better with the advantage they already had? How will Yamaha be better, because in this moment what we saw in Sepang was a bit scary for us.
They want to have the concessions, and we will let them, but I look like the idiot of the field because why should we help them? The problem is more that we have eight super fast Ducatis. If you put the performance of Ducati in the middle, then the championship is fantastic.
What about the 2027 proposals?
We have the commitment, the target to make the bikes slower simply because the tracks are not big enough. There is a safety issue and we have to respect that. I would say that from a show point of view clearly we have to do something, considering the right height devices and the aerodynamics that are making the braking points too small.
The smaller the braking points, the less chance you have to overtake, so making this phase longer will help the show. That are the main two targets.
But still I think that MotoGP should be like an aircraft with two wheels. Something completely different from the ordinary road bike and something that not everyone can ride, so obviously there are a million discussions with the manufacturers and we will never be in agreement.
I cannot say unfortunately, but we will always do proposals thinking that they will bring us an advantage. That is the reality of all the manufacturers. To be honest I think I am one of those that tries to watch MotoGP from the outside the most, for the benefit of the show, because I think if you do not do a good show… I already have a problem finding sponsors and then it will be even more difficult.
In general, this will be the guidelines, and then going into the details we will more or less get what we want. For me, making the bike too slow is not too smart. My first point was that we cannot be slower than a superbike, but at the same time I’m happy to make a slower bike because seeing as we cannot be slower than superbikes then superbikes have no future.
The only future I see in superbikes is to have superstock regulations. This is something that I am predicting, because I think they should keep the same cool name but remove the indicators and mirrors and go racing. This is the message that all the manufacturers want to send because then they can sell them.
Also we must put a price cap on the stock bike, because it is ridiculous that you can allow a €45,000 bike competing with €25,000 bikes. We are not interested in superbikes because right now it looks like the Serie B of MotoGP, but when they will do regulations that are fair then I am very happy to do it.
We homologated the 1100 for superstock, for endurance, because this is a class that we think is worth to do.
Was it frustrating to lose the new start system?
There was this kind of clarification and then we simply adapted to this clarification – but unfortunately like I said four and a half years ago, the rules are not really written perfectly. Maybe it’s also our job to help them in doing so, but there are grey areas where sometimes you get it right and you are a genius and other times you don’t do it and you waste time.
In the end though, you build experience, and I’m not too disappointed because we proved to ourselves that we are not a bunch of idiots, because we found a good solution.
But in the end it’s not just about the clutch for the starts. It’s about the bike, being physically in a position to do so, or maybe they have more front downforce so they can keep the wheels down and have more power at the start.
But you know, I am not a fan at all of the ride height device because they have changed the way to ride a bike. Now we all have to accelerate as much as we can and brake as hard as we can. We don’t turn, carry corner speed any more, and out philosophy was to make a bike that can turn with high speed.
When we went to tracks with high speed corners, we’ve always been fast because we follow that philosophy. But we have to change that. If you see Yamaha in free air they are fast, but if they are in the middle they cannot overtake. This is not about engine performance, it’s about putting the power on the ground.
We have to adapt, to change that philosophy, and step by step we need to go there until finally in 2027 we can get rid of all that shit.
What about the front tyre pressure?
I understand Michelin, but Michelin should at least give a bit of a higher range. The risk of deciding a championship is there, and this would not be nice, to leave with this kind of feeling.
We should eventually have a dedicated test as well, so that Michelin can bring a new product and tell us that OK, now you have a tyre test. In F1 we did it at the end of the season in Abu Dhabi, and a few other days here and there.
Looking to 2024, the target is maybe lower expectations?
The expectation is never to have lower expectations! But the target is to be the second manufacturer. That is the target that we have to get. We know that with the advantage that Ducati has now, physically and statistically with the number of data that they get, it is hard. Track time is simply the way to develop the bike, so they are getting twice our track time.
I’m not insulting anyone, because they managed to do it and they were right to. The problem is that they should not have been allowed to do it. This is what I am telling Carmelo every day. I’m not saying that they were not right, they did it, invested a lot, and well done. But it’s not good for the championship.
