It’s Official: Nicky Hayden To Aspar/Honda Team
Cycle News Staff | October 17, 2013
Four-time World Champion Jorge Martinez made it official today: Nicky Hayden will ride for his Power Electronics Aspar Team in the 2014 and 2015 MotoGP World Championships and he’ll do so on Honda’s new production MotoGP racer.
“It is great news for the Power Electronics Aspar Team to have the acquired services of Honda and a rider of the profile of Nicky Hayden,” Martinez said in a press release. “We are taking a huge step forward in terms of quality, prestige and image. We have grown a lot in a short space of time and we are all very excited about this new project with Honda. It is the factory that the ASPAR Team first started with back in 1992 and I have great memories of that period. Our objective is to continue being a reference point in the premier-class. I think the combination of Honda’s MotoGP Production Racer and Nicky Hayden is going to be a very successful one. We are thrilled to be working with a manufacturer with the history that Honda has and a rider like Nicky, a World Champion with huge experience. It will be a big change for us after so many years working with Italian factories, but we have high hopes for this new project. We are up for the challenge and we will give maximum effort to making sure the Power Electronics Aspar Team continues achieving top results.”
Hayden will ride the new Honda production racer, a motorcycle based on the Honda RC213V prototype currently ridden by Marc Marquez, Dani Pedrosa, Stefan Bradl and Alvaro Bautista. The team will take delivery of the new bike in time for the official MotoGP post-season test at Valencia in November.
Hayden won the MotoGP World Championship with Honda back in 2006. He also won an AMA Superbike Championship with Honda in 2002.
Martinez has yet to announce a second rider for the team, though the rider being mentioned the most is former Moto2 World Champion Hiroshi Aoyoma.
