The Dream Factories, The Flying Frenchman, And When Dreams Come True

by Michael Gougis

They exist in every professional racing series, and in a lot of the semi-professional and amateur series as well. They are the teams that go racing not to win, but just to make it onto the grid. Scratching for money, propped up often by a sympathetic series organizer, they are the teams for which “winning” means that everyone gets paid.

Think of them as the Dream Factories. Often, their drivers or riders bring cash - lots of it - to the teams to make their racing dreams into realities.

It's the other end of the grid from the factory squads, where huge multinational corporations pour marketing and engineering dollars into the men and machines that attract huge audiences and camera air time. For those squads, there are essentially no budgetary restraints, or only the ones their corporate masters choose to impose, based on complicated and occasionally emotional return on investment calculations. Fat with cash and credit, those teams pay massive salaries to the most talented racers, keep the team rosters full and the engineers back at the factory armed with whatever they need to find another tenth of a second.

Such financial support seems supernatural to the Dream Factories, although it is hard to see just how cash-strapped many of them are from the outside. Professional racing series have very specific contractual standards for appearance by their participants. Pit boxes, uniforms, lots of little things that make a team look professional aren't necessarily there by choice on the poor end of the grid. They are there because the series organizer mandates them, even though the money could be better spent on the search for speed.

But if you know what to look for, you can see it. Bodywork that is no longer used on the factory bikes shows up on the machines of the Dream Factories. Pieces that would be thrown away by a factory team are repaired, patched and painted and used again. There are fewer mechanics, fewer technicians in the truck behind the garage. They are absent from the mid-season tests, or are there with one rider.

 

 

 

When the flag drops on Sunday afternoons, they are not “in it to win it.” Winning isn't part of the dream. It's not that it never, ever happens. It's just so rare that it's not even worth dreaming about. No one holding a lottery ticket actually expects to hit it - they spend the dollar or two for the right to fantasize. The Dream Factories give those riders with the skill to make it past the qualifying cutoff time and the ability to raise money the chance to race.

This does not mean, by any stretch, that these squads are not top-flight in terms of getting a car or bike onto the grid. Indeed, that is their very reason for existence. To an extent, satellite squads and the true independent teams fill a critical role in professional racing. Many of them are winners in other categories - they are anything other than unprofessional. It's just that winning isn't the reason they are there.

 

In MotoGP, the grid would be fewer than 10 bikes if only the full factory teams and/or machines were present. The satellite squads, the independents, complete the cast. They are secondary storylines for the writers and broadcasters. They are what you watch from the stands while you are waiting for the leaders to come back around. They have to put competent machinery and competent riders on the grids to perform those roles.

They serve other functions as well.

Riders who want to show off their skills get a chance to do so by performing in front of the front-running team managers and factory executives. The fact is that most people in the business have a pretty good idea of where a bike ought to be in the pack. A rider who can take a 15th-place machine deep into the top ten will raise some eyebrows. And buying a ride with a good Dream Factory will be a lot more cost-effective than trying to start a GP team from scratch. The bad ones will suck a rider's pockets dry and put them on defective equipment. But the good teams can allow a good rider to shine.

And a good, stable satellite team can serve as kind of a control set for an experiment by running well-sorted ex-factory machinery at the same time the factory's newest stuff hits the track. How many times in racing history has the old version of the bike looked better than the new version ...

These teams and operations often perform other functions in the paddock, running bikes and riders in several classes. When MotoGP wanted to introduce its MotoE series, it turned to these teams to field the electric bikes.

And of course, they provide a place for the rider who knows they don't have the talent to run in the front, but who dreams of being in the Big Show. It's a powerful allure, to them and their personal sponsors. Many of those check-writers would rather be at the back of the pack in MotoGP than on a top-five bike in Moto2. And riders aren't the only ones who dream. All it takes to start a Dream Factory is a pile of cash and a passion for racing. The team ownership and management roles are filled throughout the paddock with people who don't make a living racing, but bring outside money to fill their personal dreams of making it into the show.

Avintia Racing has been around since 1994, starting life as Team BQR. Racing in the Spanish national championships, the team won races and titles. in 2001, the team moved into GP racing in the minor classes, and joined MotoGP in 2012 as a CRT team, racing a Kawasaki-powered grid filler. Successes, by traditional standards, were few. One very young Maverick Vinales, perhaps best known at this point in his racing career for a photo in which he was staring into the cleavage of new team sponsor Paris Hilton, accounts for about half of the team's podiums and most of its wins, in the 125cc class back in 2011.

In MotoGP, it is most recently known for running third-string Ducati machinery for pay riders Karel Abraham and Tito Rabat. The high point for the team in MotoGP was in 2016, when Hector Barbara took a two-year-old Desmosedici GP14 to 10th in the Championship, finishing fourth in a rain-lashed battle of survival in Malaysia after qualifying 12th, 2.5 seconds off of pole. It is heartbreaking to count the number of times the team's bikes were dead last at the end of a race.

Johann Zarco's heart-on-the-sleeve emotion needs no introduction here. Suffice it to say that when he said at the end of 2019 that he would leave MotoGP to race Moto2 if that is what it took to get a competitive ride, you believed him.

For 2020, Ducati was throwing factory parts at the Pramac satellite team as well as bolting them to the full factory bikes. It wouldn't hurt to have a front-line rider on the 2019 bike as a benchmark. Zarco is emotional but not an idiot, and he recognized that a bike that won races just months before would likely be in the hunt for podiums. And Avintia already was in the Ducati family.

So the Dream Factory got a World Champion rider, a fully sorted ex-factory bike and a promise that some very knowledgeable Ducati engineers would pop round the garage every now and then and offer some guidance. It was a better deal than Avintia could ever have dreamed of.

The unexpected is one of the most pleasing aspects of motor racing. Beyond the team's dreams, Zarco scored their first MotoGP podium with a third in Brno after a legendary penalty lap ride. After being punished for the terrifying crash at Austria, he bounced back and with a broken bone in his wrist put the aging Ducati on the front row of the next race.

But it was at that Brno round where Zarco took his GP19 around the circuit faster than anyone else in qualifying and gave Avintia its first ever premier class pole. You have to understand that in the two years prior, the team's MotoGP machines typically started from 16th place on the grid or further back. A top 10 in the dry would have been reason to celebrate. Top five would have left grown men in the team weeping with joy.

But on that Saturday, Avintia had the fastest road racing motorcycle in the world.

For that day, there was, literally, nothing else they could dream for.