After he crosses the finish line in Barcelona at the final round of the 2024 MotoGP season on 17 November, Takaaki Nakagami will start a new chapter in his life as a Honda test rider.
It’s a role that will take him back to his home country of Japan, a seismic shift for him after spending the best part of 10 years living in Europe.
Out of those 10, seven were spent racing in MotoGP with the LCR Honda team. He will leave the premier class with the sting of not having finished on the podium, despite coming close on a few occasions during his breakthrough 2020 campaign.
Nakagami had previously scored 14 podiums in six seasons in Moto2, including two wins, which earned him a move up to the premier class with Honda’s satellite squad, LCR. He was inducted into the Idemitsu side of the operation in 2018 to meet the Asian quota set by the lubricants company.
In 2025, it will be Thai racer Somkiat Chantra who will take over the place currently occupied by Nakagami, who took the decision to step down from MotoGP a few months ago. However, he maintains his relationship with Honda, which will keep him a test rider based in Japan.
Takaaki Nakagami, Team LCR Honda
Photo by: Asif Zubairi
This move is part of the shake-up that Honda instigated by Honda to accelerate the optimisation of its RC213V, a bike whose performance has been in free fall for some time.
The arrival of Romano Albesiano as the new technical director, plus three-time grand prix winner Aleix Espargaro into the testing division in Europe, is all part of the same overhaul. Nakagami will add another gear in the development of the parts that are tested in Japan, a task that was until now in the hands of Tetsuta Nagashima.
In next week’s finale, Nakagami will say goodbye to what can be considered more of his home track than Motegi. The Japanese rider, after all, has been living in Sant Cugat del Valles on the outskirts of Barcelona for almost a decade.
After the final stop on the calendar, and official test the following Tuesday, in which his job will be to tutor Chantra, he will pack his bags and return to his home in Chiba, a city located 40 kilometres to the east of Tokyo. There, his life will suddenly go down two gears, at least as far as travel is concerned, although he still does not know what his day-to-day routine would look like.
“We have not yet spoken with Honda. We will do so at the beginning of December, when I will go to the HRC headquarters. There they…
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