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Yamaha made its long awaited return to the Superbike World Championship this year, with the Pata Yamaha Official WorldSBK Team and finished fifth overall in the Teams’ Championship. However the season was marred with challenges, making it difficult for the team to be battling at the front with top 3. It took the whole year for them to reach the podium, but when Sylvain Guintoli finally made it in Race 1 in Qatar, his third place finish was the sweetest victory for the new team on a long road of progress. Team Manager Paul Denning caught up with WorldSBK.com to discuss the trials the team faced throughout the year, and his expectations and predictions ahead of 2017.

“The year was challenging in some respects, we’ve suffered with some unfortunate rider injuries that have curtailed our progress,” explained Denning. “As the bike started to make quite good progress, kind of a third into the season we got to a point where Sylvain was quite badly injured and Alex had broken his collarbone and we didn’t really have a rhythm to build the project. We hoped for better results, that much is clear but the level in the Championship now at the top is MotoGP level, in terms of what our main competitors are doing.”

Regardless of the team’s setbacks, they still finished the year on a good note and Denning is content with the performance of the team. He hopes that they will reach success soon considering certain performance markers that he can compare to other teams and Yamaha’s own results in the past.

“From Yamaha’s point of view they were last in the Championship at the end of 2011 with a full factory effort, a bike that was mainly developed in Japan and a very stable team with two very very good riders,” rationalised Denning. “But five years out is a long time because the structure disappears, the intellectual property gets superseded by what everybody else is doing and if you look at the way in which Kawasaki and Ducati have developed in this Championship, particularly the red bike, if you look at where that was three years ago, nobody would of given it a chance in terms of what Chaz is doing with it. So same rider, same engineers, same structure, just step-by-step development and they’ve made a success of it. In reality we’re not where that bike was three years ago so fingers crossed we can reach that level a little bit more quickly than they did and start to challenge those guys and the green bikes.”

With confidence in Alex Lowes who will stay on with Pata Yamaha Official WorldSBK Team and Michael van der Mark who is set to join them, Denning has measured targets for the team.

“We’re looking forward to 2017 with a lot of optimism but optimism that’s tempered with the realism of how tough the Championship is and how much work we have to do to get to the top level,” said Denning. “We would like to see both the R1’s with Michael and Alex consistently challenging with the top six group and pushing towards the podium right from the start of next season and targeting both riders to be in the top six of the Championship. It may not seem like a very exciting target but we have to base our goals from where we are now and that would be a significant step forward in terms of performance and consistency.”