The pressure now on Aprilia's previous winner after its MotoGP triumph

Aleix Espargaro’s maiden victory in last weekend’s Argentina Grand Prix with Aprilia was a watershed moment for MotoGP, as it means all six manufacturers on the grid have taken to the top step of the podium. It also ended a drought for Aprilia across all three classes of the world championship dating back to 2011, when Maverick Vinales won the last ever 125cc grand prix on one of the marque’s RS125s.

It’s the culmination of a decade of work dating back to the much-maligned CRT rules by Dorna Sports to make MotoGP the ultra-competitive series it is now.

When Aprilia returned to MotoGP in 2015, a year ahead of schedule, it came to the grid armed with a glorified RSV4 Superbike – and with a rider in Marco Melandri who absolutely did not want to be back in grand prix racing, having proven himself a frontrunner in World Superbikes.

Melandri, woefully off the pace, and Aprilia would part ways in the first half of the 2015 season. And it would take a long time for Aprilia to brush off the image that it was MotoGP’s perennial backmarker, a manufacturer lost at sea and with a tendency to leave good riders – chiefly Sam Lowes and Scott Redding – on the scrapheap.

In 2017 it made the first of two shrewd signings that would ultimately propel it to the front of the grid. Aleix Espargaro was deemed surplus to requirements by Suzuki at the end of 2016, ousted to be replaced by Andrea Iannone (who would later partner him at Aprilia) and was – with all due respect – the best of a very limited bunch.

“I remember perfectly when I was in Suzuki with Maverick [Vinales] and I finished there because I was not competitive enough, Aprilia called me,” Espargaro recalled when asked by Autosport after his Argentina win how it felt to prove Aprilia’s doubters wrong. “I was obviously not at the top of the list of fast riders at all. But nobody was going there, the fast riders didn’t believe in the project.”

Espargaro began his time at Aprilia in 2017 after being dropped by Suzuki

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

At the same time as Espargaro was embarking on a journey with Aprilia that would sap him of enough enthusiasm at one stage that he neared quitting come 2019, Vinales – Espargaro’s stablemate at Suzuki in 2015 and 2016 – signed to the factory Yamaha squad as one of the hottest properties at the time. Indeed, none of the top riders in the premier class saw Aprilia as a viable option.

That was something which, until very recently, continued to hang above Aprilia’s head. The arrival of Massimo Rivola, formerly a sporting director at Ferrari in Formula 1, as CEO ahead of the 2019 campaign started to bring some alignment within the team. Rivola took over the actual management side of the team, while technical chief Romano Albesiano – who was acting as team manager prior – could focus on the development of the RS-GP.

The progress Aprilia started to make with its bike was evident, but it still failed to get a top talent. Iannone was somewhat hoped to be the one having fallen out of favour at Suzuki, but the one-time MotoGP race winner couldn’t make things work at Aprilia and then was hit with a four-year doping ban back in 2020.

"I give myself till Jerez to be at the maximum with the bike and with the team. So, we keep learning because it’s just our third race with this new bike" Maverick Vinales

During the period of his suspension and trial, Aprilia stuck by Iannone. But in doing so it lost the chance to sign three-time MotoGP race winner Cal Crutchlow, who lost his LCR Honda ride at the end of 2020 to Alex Marquez. It tried and failed to secure 15-time race winner and three-time championship runner-up Andrea Dovizioso when he was ousted from Ducati at the end of 2020, with the Italian later admitting that the project wasn’t right for him at the time.

Aprilia then turned to the Moto2 paddock in the hope of snaring a young rider. But, again, none of those it tried to court, which included VR46 Ducati rookie Marco Bezzecchi and podium finisher Joe Roberts, were interested.

It was a stroke of luck that it wound up with nine-time MotoGP winner Vinales. When his relationship soured irreparably with Yamaha across the first half of 2021, Vinales pulled the pin on his two-year deal with the Japanese marque and threw his lot in with Aprilia. As far as Aprilia is concerned, Vinales is very much a long-term prospect and has worked behind the scenes to cultivate a group around him – which includes Fernando Alonso’s old trainer and a sports psychologist – to try to allow the Spaniard to extract the absolute maximum from himself.

Vinales has been given time and resources by Aprilia to get up to speed with Espargaro

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Switching from the Yamaha to the Aprilia has taken Vinales some time to adjust to. The different engine designs, with the Yamaha using an inline four-cylinder motor and Aprilia a V4, has forced him to change how he approaches corners.

After an average start to the year in Qatar with a run to 12th while Espargaro was just under a second from the podium in fourth place, Vinales made a breakthrough in finding front-end confidence during warm-up for the Indonesian GP. He wasn’t able to see how it would have impacted his race as it was wet, but from the first laps in the delayed Argentina weekend, Vinales was on top form.

He would qualify fifth and finish the race 6.5s from Espargaro in seventh, the Spaniard losing “three or four seconds battling with Ducatis”. But the smile was bright on his face after the race – because he’d found a true base set-up to start properly building his package around now, and because his decision to leave a race-winning bike in the Yamaha was vindicated (at least for now) by team-mate Espargaro’s historic win.

“Still, I think I need to learn, still I need to get confident with the bike,” said Vinales, who is still eyeing May’s Spanish GP as the weekend where he will really kick on. “I give myself till Jerez to be at the maximum with the bike and with the team. So, we keep learning because it’s just our third race with this new bike. It’s very nice to be inside the top 10, especially because I felt I could be better. So, however we worked really well, we have a lot of data to understand. And my team-mate won, so I don’t think we could ask for more from this weekend.”

Vinales is unquestionably a top talent and one of the fastest riders on the current MotoGP grid. But his years at Yamaha saw him make many statements about his form that he repeatedly failed to back up with on-track results.

In the short-term, Aprilia can rely on Espargaro sticking around for a few more years. The 32-year-old said after his maiden grand prix victory that “it would not be fair to myself” to call it quits now he finally has a bike worthy of his talent. It’s understood a new deal is close to being agreed and Argentina will have likely gotten it over the line.

Espargaro looks assured of a MotoGP contract extension at Aprilia

Photo by: MotoGP

And whatever Rivola may have said back in February about Vinales, Argentina has changed everything for Aprilia.

“The level we are showing now is good,” Espargaro stated last Sunday. “Still there is a lot of work to do, but I think now the people – especially the young riders in Moto2 and Moto3 – start to see the project of Aprilia more seriously, like an option for the future.”

Aprilia made mistakes in the past backing wrong horses, it’s unlikely to happen again now it can confidently put itself on the market as a race-winning manufacturer

With the level of talent coming through Moto3 and Moto2 right now, there are a host of options Aprilia will now find knocking on its door looking for a ride. While it has made mistakes in the past backing wrong horses, it’s unlikely to happen again now it can confidently put itself on the market as a race-winning manufacturer.

Already coming into this year Vinales had to make things work. He turned his back on Yamaha during a title-winning season. But – whether he will admit it or not right now – the pressure is on even more after Argentina.

Can Vinales deliver for Aprilia?

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images