EXCLUSIVE: MotoGP's newest team plans to stand apart from factory giants

Justin Mark’s Trackhouse organisation doesn’t like to just make up the numbers. It was winning races in the NASCAR Cup Series inside its second year in 2022.

That year, Ross Chastain made it into the final championship playoff spot after wallriding his way from 10th to fifth at the finish at Martinsville in a moment of motorsport history that will always feature on highlight reels.

The team, part-owned by international music superstar Pitbull, rocked up to the Chicago street race in 2023 with Supercars hero Shane Van Gisbergen, who won on his NASCAR debut.

A few months later, Trackhouse took a bit of a left-field turn and announced its plans to enter the MotoGP World Championship in 2024. Marks had been evaluating the move for a while, but the collapse of the RNF squad as a result of title sponsor CryptoDATA selling the team - and MotoGP - a dud led to an opportunity too good to miss for Trackhouse.

It took over the RNF operation, rebranded it, strengthened its ties with Aprilia and brought an American-owned team to the MotoGP grid.

In its first season in the premier class, it achieved a maiden sprint podium in Germany courtesy of Miguel Oliveira - who has moved to Pramac Yamaha for 2025. A sixth in the Catalan Grand Prix for Raul Fernandez, just 24 hours after crashing out of the lead of the sprint, was the high Sunday point of the campaign.

Otherwise, though, Trackhouse finished ninth in the teams’ rankings ahead of only the struggling Honda squads. Injury for Oliveira blighted the second half of the year, while a mid-season switch from an RS-GP23 to the obviously worse RS-GP24 for Fernandez left him chasing his tail for the rest of the campaign.

Davide Brivio on Trackhouse's MotoGP vision

If Americans have a reputation for being big and brash, Trackhouse didn’t quite hit this mark on its MotoGP debut - at least, on track.

Behind the scenes, Trackhouse caused a bit of a stir. It brought in former Yamaha and Suzuki team manager Davide Brivio, who’d spent 2021-2023 with Alpine, and made one of the biggest shock signings of the silly season.

While an American-owned team looked dead set to produce the country’s first full-time MotoGP rider since 2015, Joe Roberts found himself without a seat sucking his thumb when the music stopped. After rumours of Jack Miller and Sergio Garcia came and went, it was Ai Ogura who got the nod with a two-year contract.

The Japanese rider was putting together a solid campaign by this point, having won twice, while missing the Austrian GP with injury did nothing to set him back. A third win followed at Misano, by now his consistency coupled with team-mate Garcia’s MotoGP rejection-induced struggles putting him well on course to win the Moto2 title. When he was crowned champion at the Thai Grand Prix, Trackhouse’s contract with him for 2025 had aged like a fine wine.

Reflecting on his first year at the helm of Trackhouse, Brivio remarks to Crash: “We have to say thank you to Ai, because winning the championship he made us make a good choice!”

What was surprising about Ogura’s Trackhouse deal wasn’t that the team had elected to pair a Japanese rider with a Spaniard instead of putting an American on one of the RS-GPs: it was that Ogura was on the market in the first place.

Honda had been waiting patiently for Ogura to want to come to MotoGP, but its poor results in recent years kept him cautious. When he stepped out of the Honda Team Asia set-up for 2024 in Moto2, it was a clear sign that Ogura was looking for his best route into the big leagues - not the easiest. This is something that stood out to Brivio, as he recalls the decision-making process.

“In Ai we saw something, somebody that was a real fighter, resilient sometimes, maybe he has a bad start but keeps going, recovers,” Brivio said.

“Also, his riding style seems to be probably a good starting point to be a MotoGP riding style.

“So, we also like his attitude, looks like somebody very committed, somebody focused on what he is doing - a serious, hard worker. A few things like that.”

Ogura’s laid back approach to his racing was evident when he had his first MotoGP test in Barcelona in November. Most rookie talk about how different carbon fibre brakes are compared to the steel ones used in Moto2.

For Ogura, it was “not really a drama for me”. Nor was the violent speed of MotoGP bikes: “I expected more of a surprise than I had”.

The next Maverick Vinales or Joan Mir?

MotoGP’s storied Japanese history is something Ogura is going to be faced with every time he goes on track. While Takaaki Nakagami has flown the flag for the country since 2018, Ogura feels like the first Japanese rider in a long time with the potential to do something really special.

That’s something Trackhouse recognises, though the expectations on him for year one are understandably reserved.

That’s something Brivio will see to, having been a champion of young talents in the past and understood what they need to flourish.

At Suzuki, he picked Maverick Vinales straight out of Moto2 for the brand’s return to MotoGP in 2015. By 2016, Vinales was winning races but the hopes of ‘building a Suzuki rider’ - as Brivio put it - didn’t quite pan out as the Spaniard was snared by Yamaha for 2017. But Brivio was able to mould Alex Rins into a multiple race winner, while Joan Mir delivered Suzuki its first world title in 20 years back in 2020.

Suzuki’s situation, Brivio admits, was borne out of necessity given “to be very honest, now after many years we were at the time a new manufacturer… entering not as a new manufacturer but entering at the beginning of the project, and it was difficult at the time to get confidence from top riders. So, for several reasons we decided to go for this young rider project.”

Nevertheless, rearing young riders is something Brivio enjoys. And with Trackhouse, it’s the direction he is forging ahead with.

“Trackhouse, we were at the point where we wanted to do something, also looking at the future or whatever, and it was not easy to take a decision also in respect of Miguel who we honestly have nothing to complain about,” Brivio explains.

“His performance, his behaviour in the team and everything [was great]. It was just a project, the idea of a different project, not personally related to the riders.

“Ogura, as a rookie, and then also as a Raul who is still young and we think has a lot of talent, which he hasn’t expressed yet. So, he has the potential, he’s still young, he’s going into his fourth year in MotoGP.

“So, we thought ‘ok, we give him the responsibility of the team and now he has to deliver’. We will see if he delivers.

“So, it’s a project. Raul, young but experienced; Ai, a rookie but with potential, trying to build up something for the next years for Trackhouse.”

Will Trackhouse's plan backfire?

The obvious pitfall with backing young talent and helping them to grow is that, eventually, they end up on wish lists for rival manufacturers. Brivio experienced that first-hand with Vinales at Suzuki; Joan Mir had Ducati offers on the table but elected to stick with Suzuki. It’s hard to predict what way a rider’s mind will be made up.

Brivio isn’t naive to the fact that, for 2027, Ogura could well be getting offers thrown at him from factories he may find hard to refuse.

But, unlike a lot of satellite structures, Trackhouse has no ambitions of being a nursery. It has seen what Pramac has been able to do, fielding a super talent in Jorge Martin and using its status with Ducati to win the championship in 2022, and wants to make Trackhouse a similarly attractive destination.

“Honestly, we don’t have in mind to grow up riders for a factory team,” Brivio states. “But, I have to say, we are fully aware of the risk because at the moment still all the riders have the ambition to be in a factory team. Whether this is a good decision or not, it depends on situations.

“And maybe one challenge that we would like to take is maybe to try to make an independent team good where at least a rider has a dilemma to leave or not.

“But we are very much aware of this risk. We know that if maybe Ai will be good, probably in ’27 someone will come and try to pick him up.

“The challenge is to try to keep him here, and to make him happy and hopefully have a good bike to have good results and keep him here. And it’s very interesting what is happening now with Pramac, fighting for the championship, so somehow this, I think, with Pramac winning the championship I hope that this helps the riders to think more.

“Because also let’s say it’s better to be in an independent team with a good bike, or is it better to go into a factory team with an uncertain prospective? I am happy for what Pramac is doing.

“I said to Paolo [Campinoti] ‘you are working for the hopes of all the independent teams because we are looking at you as what an independent team can do’. I hope that in the future the difference between factory and independent team will be less, especially now because we are going into an era where all manufacturers are treating independent teams in equal conditions.

“With Aprilia we will have four factory bikes. KTM will have four factory bikes. Honda has already had four factory bikes. Yamaha will have four factory bikes. So, basically - with maybe only Ducati - there is no more old bikes on the grid. And this will probably help to create less gap between factory and independent team. And it will be nice to see this balance changing in the future.”

Trackhouse’s slogan for any new signing is ‘Welcome to the House’. Clearly, its ambitions - influenced by Pramac - point more towards crafting the kind of environment its riders want to call home for a long time.