Honda denies production bike race plan rumour

Honda has rubbished rumours that it will race its new production Honda RC213V in the last eight races of the 2013 MotoGP campaign.

The new bike, which HRC plans to sell five of for around £850,000 next season, recently completed a successful shakedown test at the Twin Ring Motegi track in Japan last month.

That led to speculation that Honda planned to offer the production RC213V machine to former 250GP world champion Hiroshi Aoyama to race from the Brno round onwards in late August to accelerate development.

Aoyama currently races an FTR-Kawasaki for the Spanish-based Avintia Blusens squad and HRC boss Shuhei Nakamoto told MCN: “This is just a rumour.”

Nakamoto also confirmed that Honda had no plans to let test rider Kousuke Akiyoshi, who has been leading development of the production machine project, race it as a wild card entry in October’s Japanese Grand Prix at the Twin Ring Motegi.

He added: “At the moment we have no plans for a wild card race.”

HRC boss Livio Suppo confirmed to MCN during this week’s Motorland Aragon test that the new production bike could be shown in public for the first time at Brno, but it won’t make a track appearance in Europe until the post race test session at the Valencia track in November.