Just when you thought the world couldn’t get any stranger, you see Kenny Roberts walking around the MotoGP paddock with the word “Honda” displayed prominently on his pit shirt. Just as strangely, Kenny Roberts Jr. emerges from a test session without complaining about his engine performance.
After years of playing David in his own David vs Goliath myth, Roberts has formed a partnership with Goliath. The maverick who thought he didn’t need a big Japanese OEM to compete in MotoGP, and beat his head against the wall repeatedly trying to prove it, has apparently come to his senses.
The interesting question is, why did Honda offer engines to Roberts in the first place? Team Roberts definitely has a lot of advantages on their side (for a privateer team) – they’ve shown that they can build a competent chassis, they have demonstrated excellent staying power (despite never having a truly competitive engine package), and they seem to have no trouble finding capable riders to man their machines.
So, now that King Kenny is ‘powered by Honda’, what will happen with his team? We expect that since they won’t have to worry about engine developement, they will be able to concentrate more on their already competitive chassis, and this should help them make real progress towards consistent top-ten finishes. Roberts has already shown that even when struggling to build a competitive motor, he can scrounge up enough cash from sponsors to keep going through the season – now that he’s got a competitive engine program, we just might see a ‘snowball’ effect, as better performance attracts more sponsor money, which is invested into developing a machine that allows even better performance.
