MotoGP will have a new team in 2024, as Trackhouse Racing takes over the satellite Aprilia machines from next season.
Trackhouse Racing will arrive at MotoGP in 2024 as the replacement for the RNF team that ran satellite Aprilias in 2023 and which was recently kicked out of the sport.
Ahead of the reveal of Trackhouse as RNF’s replacement, MotoGP published an article on its website that said “Dorna, IRTA and RNF have been able to amicably solve their differences that arose in the last part of the 2023 [MotoGP] season.” That cleared the path for RNF’s vacant grid slots and ownerless satellite RS-GPs to be handed over to Trackhouse Racing, which was announced an hour later.
The Trackhouse team is famous for being part-owned by Armando Christian Perez, who is better known as Pitbull, but its racing pedigree is confirmed by former NASCAR racer Justin Marks, who helped found the team in 2021, and who said in the team’s announcement video that he grew up watching motorcycle races at Laguna Seca.
In 2023, Trackhouse made NASCAR history by winning the series’ first-ever street race with the Australian Shane van Gisbergen, but it is now fulfilling its goal to move onto a global platform.
In its MotoGP effort, Trackhouse will inherit the team that previously worked under the RNF name, including the riders: Miguel Oliveira and Raul Fernandez. But it will dress them in much more distinctive paint than the deep blue and green of RNF, as Trackhouse has seemingly gone for a full ‘stars and stripes’ livery for its RS-GPs, one of which could potentially be a 2024-spec bike, per reporting by Autosport at the Valencia Grand Prix two weeks ago.
MotoGP has recently looked at Formula One’s growth in the US with envy, as it has been unable to find the same traction there. Trackhouse’s inclusion in the championship, coupled with its unapologetic ownership and display of its nationality, can surely be of positivity to MotoGP’s American cause.
