The top MotoGP rides no one wants

On October 15 2006, Toni Elias came from 11th on the grid to take his maiden premier class victory at Estoril. It was a big day for the 23-year-old in just his second season in MotoGP, as it was also his first podium finish and the first time he'd led a race. And he did it by beating Valentino Rossi to victory by just 0.002 seconds.

Elias was riding a satellite Honda, run by the Gresini team, and his success was the last time a rider not based in a factory garage graced the top step of the podium. Now, nearly 10 years later, the boss of the leading satellite team with basically the same bikes as Jorge Lorenzo and Rossi can barely give his second one away.

Between 2003 and '06, Gresini actually won 14 races, the bulk with Sete Gibernau on his way to second in the '03 and '04 championships to Rossi. They were heady days for satellite teams. Behind the factory Honda and Yamahas, a well-run satellite Honda - such as Gresini's - was about on par with the emerging Ducati as an attractive ride, and well ahead of Suzuki and Kawasaki's factory programmes.

A decade on, satellite teams are still doing a good job with strong machinery and decent riding talent. But the level of what is happening around them has gone up. Yamaha and Honda are still the main forces. Ducati is way stronger than its current championship position suggests. Suzuki has made significant progress since returning 18 months ago and Aprilia - run on the racing side by Gresini - is at the back but showing glimpses with its first proper MotoGP bike.

KTM will join them next year, taking MotoGP to 12 factory entries on the 23-bike grid. The Austrian brand has cherry-picked last year's top satellite rider Bradley Smith and this years best-placed satellite rider, Pol Espargaro, both men deciding to leave Tech3's almost-factory Yamahas for an unproven project, and their current chief Herve Poncharal is worried.

When Espargaro announced his departure, the Tech3 boss said "at the moment I am not a very happy man.

"I don't know if it's a trend of fashion or... if you're a young, fast rider, there is nothing but a factory ride. This is quite difficult for us to swallow and to understand.

"Clearly, [satellite teams] were B teams some years ago, but I think we are now C teams. Now, I think the B teams are the new factories like Suzuki and I don't know if Ducati is B+ or A-, but something like that.

"This is showing all of us the power of the factory. Nobody has seen the KTM on track. Nobody knows how it's going to be - maybe it will be very fast, I don't know, maybe they will need time to reach the level of a top team. They prefer to go to unknown territory, as long as it's a factory bike, more than having [Tech3's] full factory Yamaha - almost identical to the factory team.

"But this is why I feel more and more... what can we do to attract a young, exciting prospect?"

What is currently Lorenzo's seat is going to Maverick Vinales, a rider who graduated straight into MotoGP with a factory, Suzuki in his case. Part of Poncharal's predicament is that satellite teams had once been a way into a factory ride, but the last time one of his riders graduated was Ben Spies in 2011.

"I always said that we were, inside the Yamaha organisation, the junior team," he said. "But are we the junior team inside Yamaha now? I think the answer is clearly no."

The key figure - and best case study - in all of this is Alex Rins. The Moto2 championship leader is perhaps the best prospect not yet in MotoGP. The Spaniard finished fifth, second and third in his three Moto3 seasons and second in Moto2 last year.

He wants to move up to MotoGP next year. Yamaha's Lin Jarvis has said that, "if he would choose to come to the Tech3 team, he would be most welcome", but Rins has his heart set on a factory ride. It looks like he's going to get it, with Suzuki, which should be stronger than Tech3 next year so it's a sensible outcome. But would his British title rival Sam Lowes - who did his 2017 Aprilia MotoGP deal last year - be better placed on a Tech3 Yamaha next year?

Rins has suggested he'd rather stay in Moto2 for another year - which would be probably end up being two years, with the way factory contract cycles work - than join a satellite MotoGP team. That is obviously his right, but does not say a lot about those outfits.

"He will be a very exciting prospect for us," Poncharal said of Rins, who has talked 2017 with Tech3. "He's also got the same sponsor, which is Monster, so it makes sense.

"But when he sees who is on the factory Yamaha next year, he sees someone who joined Suzuki. So is it the best route to go through Tech3 to have the factory Yamaha? It doesn't look like that at the moment.

"So it means it's better to do a third year in Moto2 than coming to LCR, Tech3, Pramac? I don't know. Clearly for the young, talented riders who we need to get results and who the sponsors want to have with them, at the moment all the independent teams are not too popular."

That means Poncharal is set to field an all-rookie line-up next year with - assuming the Rins-to-Suzuki deal happens - Johann Zarco joining the already-signed Jonas Folger. Zarco won last year's Moto2 title and Folger is a race winner in the class. Poncharal had been keen to keep Espargaro, currently sixth in MotoGP, to provide some stability and experience, knowing that "the riders are making a difference" in the results.

"Clearly, you've got five, six, seven riders, the only ones who can fight for victories or at least fight for podiums and all of these guys, they all have interest in going to full factories," he said. "So clearly this is a tough time because I remember in 2012, we were taking eight podiums a year [with Andrea Dovizioso and Cal Crutchlow], and this has changed.

"Of course if you don't have the right riders, you don't have the package that is exciting for a sponsor and if you don't have a sponsor you can have even less chance to pick up an exciting rider. You [can] have a positive circle, but you also have a vicious circle, maybe about the independent team's future."

Motorsport is about results, especially when it comes to finding sponsors to cover what Poncharal estimates as his "between eight and nine" million euro budget, with the hardware from Yamaha - set at €2.2m per rider next year - accounting for about half of that. Consider Marc VDS, have you seen Jack Miller or Tito Rabat (in their second and first seasons respectively) on screen much this year other than when they have fallen trying to tame the difficult Honda?

LCR scaled back from two riders to one in 2016, selling sponsorship by grands prix because finding a year-long title backer has proven difficult. Forward Racing, AB Motorracing and Ioda Racing have all left MotoGP, running in various guises in World Superbikes instead.

Is there an easy answer? As Poncharal concedes, no. Yamaha took Lorenzo straight out of 250cc in 2008 but Jarvis now says for a rider to "to come directly to the factory team for me has never been an option", referring primarily to "factories that are immediately challenging to win the title".

A regulatory push for riders to spend their rookie season with a satellite team ended with Marc Marquez in 2013. Honda needed somebody to replace the retiring Casey Stoner. Repsol wanted Marquez on the factory bike it sponsors, not a Castrol-backed LCR Honda. And Marquez reportedly wanted to bring all of his own crew, which to LCR would've meant firing its existing people and then having to start again 12 months later. Rules were duly adjusted.

Poncharal says he is due to discuss the situation more with Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta at Assen later this month. But he acknowledges that satellite teams are, simply and for a variety of reasons, slightly further down the pecking order than they once were.

What has not helped this year is the dual switch to Michelin tyres and the introduction of a control ECU. Both have required significant brainpower, the quantity and quality of which factories are better-equipped to secure. Smith, for instance, has probably been the biggest loser in the move away from Bridgestones. The rider, and by extension his Tech3 crew, basically getting lost trying to understand the new rubber.

The factories are learning the electronics on the fly, then passing down their findings and recommended settings to the satellite teams. MotoGP's move away from expensive, factory-developed ECUs has helped get Suzuki and Aprilia to return, and inspire KTM to join them. All three brands are - in time - likely to squeeze the satellite teams down the timesheets.

"When we only have two factories, we are fighting best of the rest to be fifth," Poncharal surmises. "And if something would eventually happen we could grab a podium.

"Now, we have a minimum of four factories ahead of us. So it means fighting for ninth. But then with six factories being faster than us we can fight for 13th.

"I think it's nobody's fault, the decisions were correct. The championship is more exciting because now you have Ducati who can win races, you have Suzuki which is very close to winning races and the two new factories, Aprilia and KTM, will be fast also."

Last year, Crutchlow grabbed a podium for LCR in Argentina. Four satellite riders graced the podium in all, but rostrum visits for Danilo Petrucci for Pramac Ducati at Silverstone and Smith for Tech3 and Scott Redding then with Marc VDS at Misano came at the end of weather-affected races.

We are yet to see a satellite rider really come close to a podium this year, but is life harder for them? When I put that question to Crutchlow, he said: "No I don't think so. I think the championship at the moment is ultra competitive.

"Sure in our manufacturer we're struggling with the electronics so we're a step behind as a manufacturer, let alone a satellite team, because we're different to the factory guys with some things.

"At the end of the day, everyone has the same tyre, everyone has the same electronics, the problem is they don't have the same engineers, some are cleverer than others and that's the simple truth. And some have worked with the system a lot more than the others so I think next year, we'll see a lot closer field.

"Maybe some things will filter down soon from the manufacturers to the satellite teams but we're in this transition stage of them also finding out their balance with the bike and tyres and with the electronics too. I don't think they'll give everything immediately to the satellite teams, like last year or the year before."

Given how tough his start to the season has been - largely Honda-related - some competitors would have taken that opportunity to play the 'woe is satellite' card, as a justification or excuse for results. But Crutchlow is an honest and switched-on guy, he has been around long enough to know the score.

Hopefully he is right, when he says that satellite teams should be stronger again next year. Having factories involved is great and vital for MotoGP, but other than the omnipresent Yamaha and Honda they have tended to come and go from grand prix motorcycle racing over the decades. It is a marketing activity, after all, and as motorsport learned during the global financial crisis, when manufacturers hit turbulent waters, motorsport involvement is threatened.

If, as unlikely as it seems, they all left MotoGP you would be left with people such as Poncharal, Lucio Cecchinello, Marc VDS' Michael Bartholemy, Pramac's Paolo Campinoti, Aspar's Jorge Martinez and Avintia's Raul Romero to fill a grid. Let alone give the likes of Rins a crack at the big time.