Marco Melandri was one of the riders who marked the first years of the MotoGP era. He made his debut in the premier category in 2003 with the official Yamaha team, moving to Tech3 the following year to make room for Valentino Rossi.
And the former rider admitted to the Relevo website that at the time there was a big difference between an official team and a satellite team, with the bike being inferior: ‘The official team is the point of reference, the place where you can work to develop and improve the bike. In my case, I didn’t even feel like it was 2003 because they were working for 2004. You see, the satellite team thing… in my first race in South Africa I had a bike with a “big bang” engine and another with a “screamer” engine ”. It wasn’t like today, where you have seven engines for the season. At the time it was free: they gave me used engines from Valentino, from Carlos [Checa], already with many kilometers. Yes, we had a much inferior bike. It’s something objective‘.
At the time, electronics were starting to be introduced and even in this aspect the difference could be felt, according to Melandri: ‘I’ll tell you more. Today you take a satellite Ducati, and it has its own electronics engineer. Not at the time, because it was the beginning of electronics. They were telemetrists trying to be engineers. There wasn’t the same lineup‘.
When asked if it was more difficult to win with a satellite team at the time, the Italian confirmed: ‘Yes, especially in the first two years of that period, because everything was new. Only the official team gave that advantage. Even at the software level, at the electronics level… however, the satellite team had to discover everything from scratch. He didn’t just have data‘.
