At the presentation of Yamaha's 2013 MotoGP campaign, where the bike which Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi will ride in the coming season was unveiled, it was clear that there was one thing missing from the bike: this season, as for the last two years, Yamaha's MotoGP team will not have a title sponsor, but will campaign in corporate colors once again. Though the news hardly came as a surprise - the colors being used throughout the winter testing period suggested that Yamaha would be racing without a title sponsor - we were interested to find out whether the current situation is sustainable.
To that end, we cornered Yamaha Racing's Managing Director Lin Jarvis, and put a few questions to him. Firstly, we asked, could Yamaha's MotoGP team manage without a title sponsor, or was the expanded support from non-title sponsors sufficient? The answer to those questions was "yes and yes" Jarvis quipped. "We can manage, because we are a factory team, and so the basic point of us racing is not to make a profit the basic idea is to promote Yamaha's brand image around the world, to generate excitement in our industry and to develop our engineers and our technologies. Certainly, having more income definitely helps us, so we're constantly searching for new sponsorships, new partners."
"What I'm happy about is that we have retained almost all of our sponsors from last year, and some of them have stepped up. IVECO have stepped up, and increased. We've got Monster Energy on board now. They've been with the riders in the past, with Ben, but Monster coming on board has been a real boost, and has enabled us to put both riders together under the same Monster umbrella. That's completed what I call the Monster pyramid, because they support us in so many classes, but they missed that top class of MotoGP with the factory team. Our situation is better than last year in terms of income, but we still are constantly looking and pushing, not only for income, but also for new partners to promote."
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