“Our goal has always been to prepare our young drivers as best as possible for a move to a factory team.” – With these words, VR46 team manager Pablo Nieto said goodbye to Luca Marini in November last year as he headed to Repsol Honda, thus making a first possible. With successor Fabio Di Giannantonio, no Academy driver will be driving in Valentino Rossi’s MotoGP team in 2024 for the first time. Almost seven months later, the horror scenario is now looming: in 2025, no official VR46 driver could drive for the racing team at all.
Marco Bezzecchi, who finished third in the World Championship with VR46 last year, is moving to Aprilia next season to replace Maverick Vinales, who is surprisingly moving to Herve Poncharal’s KTM customer team Tech3. VR46 Racing is currently one of four MotoGP racing teams on the driver market without a regular driver for 2025. Fabio Di Giannantonio is likely to stay, as Valentino Rossi announced on Mugello Saturday that he would prefer to continue with the 2024 lineup. But the 25-year-old Roman is not a VR46 Academy driver, which puts the racing team in a strange situation.
Only one VR46 Academy rider in Moto2: Celestino Vietti not in MotoGP form
In Moto2 and Moto3, the VR46 Racing Academy only has one rider left: Celestino Vietti. The 22-year-old Italian is Rossi’s only young talent who would currently be considered for promotion to the MotoGP team, as Andrea Migno and Niccolo Antonelli have long since disappeared from the motorcycle world championship. The problem: Vietti was not able to attract attention with spectacular performances in the 2023 season, and the move to the top team Red Bull KTM Ajo, which produced the last three Moto2 world champions, has not yet brought the hoped-for upswing in 2024.
In fact, Vietti finished the current season in seventh place at best and only collected 38 world championship points. This means that the Ajo rider is already 84 points behind world championship leader Sergio Garcia, so the planned title fight has already collapsed after the first third of the season. Boscoscuro seems to have clearly overtaken Kalex in Moto2 2024, but Vietti is 77 points behind even the best Kalex of Joe Roberts. A promotion to MotoGP is clearly too early for the man who was able to win three Moto2 races in 2022.
Last free Academy driver: Will VR46 Racing sign Franco Morbidelli?
And that, in turn, puts VR46 Racing in a situation where it will probably have to completely deviate from its own team philosophy in 2025 in order to be able to create a competitive driver line-up at all. Because a young driver from its own talent factory is not available as a replacement for Bezzecchi. At least: Valentino Rossi’s team does not necessarily have to do without an official VR46 Academy driver. After all, there is still Franco Morbidelli, who will drive for Pramac Racing in 2024.
However, the contract of the 2020 MotoGP vice world champion expires at the end of the season and a stay at Pramac is not certain. The racing team of team founder Paolo Campinoti is expected to move to Yamaha, which is desperately looking for a new customer team. Since Morbidelli only parted ways with Yamaha at the start of the current season, it seems unlikely that he would want to return to the Japanese manufacturer with Pramac. This would clear the way for a switch to VR46 Racing – at least on paper.
If Pramac switches to Yamaha: Does VR46 have to accommodate Fermin Aldeguer?
There is still one problem: With the likely switch from Pramac to Yamaha, the slot as the top customer team of the Reds would become free in the Ducati camp, and with it two current factory machines. ‘Sky Italia’ reported back in April that Ducati would like to make VR46 Racing the new ‘customer team number one’ from 2027, and this could now happen as early as 2025. It is quite possible, however, that Ducati will then want to place Moto2 rider Fermin Aldeguer, who is under contract directly with the Italian manufacturer and will be promoted to MotoGP next season, in the Rossi team, which means that if Di Giannantonio stays, there would be no room for Morbidelli.
Then VR46 Racing would again be without its own academy pilot and would probably have to question its raison d’être regardless of the driver line-up for the coming season. After all, the purpose of the team is to prepare young drivers for a move to larger teams, as was done with Marini and Bezzecchi. Not to give pilots like Morbidelli who failed in factory teams a second chance in order to have a driver from the team’s own academy in the first place. And since – apart from Vietti – there are no serious MotoGP candidates from the VR46 Academy in sight in the medium to long term future, the strange situation of the 2025 season will probably not remain an exception, but rather become the norm.
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