Whats with Kawasaki and Eckl?That sounds like a very Japanese press release?

IIRC Kawasaki felt that Eckl did not put enough effort into retaining Nakano.BoF

from crash.net:QuoteKawasaki has announced a radical restructuring of its MotoGP project for 2007 - and revealed that its split from team principal Harald Eckl was due to his 'serious involvement with a competitor's MotoGP activities'.Eckl's European-based team has run Kawasaki's MotoGP race effort since its 2002 debut, and had led the company's factory WSBK challenge before that, but - as previously reported - Kawasaki has terminated the German's contract a year early and will now run its race team 'in house' next season, under the control of racing director Ichiro Yoda."The new team infrastructure is a result of the Japanese manufacturer's recent necessary split from Harald Eckl and the company KMGP, after Kawasaki was confronted with Eckl's serious involvement with a competitor's MotoGP activities, which forced Kawasaki to terminate the relationship immediately," read a Kawasaki statement.The identity of the competitor in question wasn't revealed, but is thought to be the Ilmor SRT team. Eckl previously worked with Suter Racing Technology (SRT), when Eskil Suter's firm designed the ZX-RR's chassis, and may even have helped Mario Illien and Suter form their new team. Eckl has yet to respond to the allegations or announce his future plans."Last year we fielded the most competitive Ninja ZX-RR since Kawasaki returned to grand prix racing at the end of the 2002 season, as Shinya Nakano's second place at Assen proved. But, the overall results in 2006 clearly were not what we were expecting, due, in part, to a lack of dedicated attention from our former team manager," was the biting verdict of Kawasaki's president, Consumer Products & Machinery Company, Shinichi Tamba.

Press releases are notoriously terrible for trying to find out underlying facts. For whatever reason, the split was not entirely amicable and Kawasaki claims that their previous work with Suter Engineering contributed to this. Who knows, maybe Eckl did work with Suter in some way on the Ilmor project and was maybe hoping to become officially involved at some stage. All we do know is that Eckl is not part of Kawasaki's GP effort anymore. Sometimes a change like that is necessary to move forward.