UPDATE: KTM has officially confirmed the departure of Mike Leitner as MotoGP team manager.
Francesco Guidotti, MotoGP team manager at Pramac Ducati for almost a decade, will move to KTM next season, according to a report from La Gazzetta dello Sport.
Guidotti previously worked for KTM in the 250cc class from 2006 to 2009 before returning to Aprilia as a team manager in WorldSBK and moving to Pramac in 2012.
With closer ties to Ducati and more competitive machinery, Guidotti has seen the satellite team climb from the battle for the top six in their first season to this year’s world title with Johann Zarco and their first Ducati win with Jorge Martin.
Of course, Guidotti’s KTM start would raise major doubts about the future of the current race director Mike Leitner.
Related articles
Leitner made 57 Grand Prix starts as a 125cc driver before moving to technical roles, including two years with Öhlins before joining forces with Dani Pedrosa as Crew Chief in 2004.
Pedrosa won the title in his two 250cc seasons and took Leitner to MotoGP in 2006 with Repsol Honda in 2014.
Related articles
Leitner later began working on the brand new KTM MotoGP project, which made its racing debut at the end of 2016. Since then, as team manager, Leitner has seen the RC16 reach its first podium in 2018, then the groundbreaking 2020 campaign with wins from Brad Binder (1) and Miguel Oliveira (2).
That success, however, marked the end of technical concessions and the plant suffered inconsistent form in 2021, a strong midseason lined with a tough start and a tough end.
Still, Binder finished sixth in the world championship, a place among Pol Espargaro’s KTM best in 2020, and the team celebrated a win each for Oliveira and Binder.
However, the plant fell from fourth to fifth in the constructors’ classification and from third to sixth in the team classification.
Should Guidotti’s move be confirmed (an announcement is expected anytime), he will return to Fabiano Sterlacchini, who spent 17 years at Ducati and rose to a managerial position alongside Gigi Dall’Igna before leaving the sport for a year and then returning as technical director of KTM’s MotoGP earlier this year.
Guidotti’s KTM deal would remove another potential name from the list of candidates for the Suzuki team manager position in 2022, while adding Leitner’s new opportunity.