He would have liked to take to the track, but in the end Maverick Vinales had to settle for the role of spectator. On a lightning visit to the Jerez de la Frontera circuit where KTM test riders Dani Pedrosa and Pol Espargaro were involved in a private test session, the Spaniard nonetheless got a chance to start getting acquainted with his new team.
Despite the fact that the Austrian company is navigating in bad waters, on his Instagram profile, the 29-year-old only wanted to share his eagerness to personally test the bike proclaiming himself "excited about the direction taken."
Interviewed instead by DAZN for the documentary "Maverick: dos vidas," the rider from Roses summed up his path in MotoGP so far in a few words, defining his period in Suzuki as "pure passion," his stay in Yamaha as "business," and his more recent arrival in Aprilia as a mix of the two, emphasizing, however, that the Noale manufacturer "really lives racing and this aspect has given me back that love I had in the past for motorcycling."
Having recovered his enthusiasm and hunger for success, Vinales seems to have no doubts about his next goals. "What I want is to win the World Championship," he confessed, "and to achieve that, there are two roads today: either being in KTM or Ducati, but ticking off a Desmosedici is not easy. On the contrary, it is complicated if you do not have an official bike, this is because although they are the same model, the weapons available are different, so the only option for me was the one I chose and therefore to be the challenger."
In a 2024 short on satisfaction for Aprilia, the Spaniard was in any case able to rejoice on at least one occasion, namely at Austin. "In that GP it's like I said, 'I'm there.' I consider it my best performance ever in MotoGP, the one where I really was superior. It was kind of like being in a video game, everything I did worked. On the other hand, though, it made me ask questions, such as why it wasn't always like that all the time and why I didn't have the opportunity to showcase myself more often, and the answer was that I wasn't in the right place," he revealed.
And speaking of being in the right place, Maverick as a father rejected the presence of children in the paddock, starting with his own. "It's not a world for them, and I don't think it's a place where they can learn anything," he declared.