Thanks to the raft of changes introduced in all the three classes of GP racing chassis makers have comeback into the spot light for the last couple of years, mainly in Moto2 and with this year in Moto3 and MotoGP as well.  The first year of Moto2 saw more than a dozen chassis makers with the Swiss Suter turning out to be the most successful, but in the second year the chassis of choice was the German Kalex.  All along Buckingham based British chassis maker FTR has had its share of customers even after the whittling down of chassis makers in the second year of Moto2.  This year when Moto3 has replaced the two stroke 125 cc class, Honda and KTM have been the two proper factories to offer fully built motorcycles along with the option of engines that could be fit into custom chassis.

After the first race of the season it appears that Honda’s chassis has not come upto rider expectations while the Honda powered FTR of Maverick Vinales won the race.  This has forced most Honda teams including the San Carlo Gresini team to abandon the Honda chassis and go for the FTR from this week’s Jerez GP on.  But it has not been all gain for FTR with Spanish rider Julian Simon choosing to get rid of FTR and go for a Suter while in MotoGP the Spanish BQR team that runs the Avintia Racing effort with an FTR chassis and Kawasaki ZX10R engine has decided to experiment with a carbon fibre chassis (carbon fibre+aluminium actually) developed by the Spanish firm Inmotec.  Inmotec was originally supposed to have taken on the aborted MotoGP effort of BMW and were scheduled to race in 2010 along with FB Corse another privateer team.  Neither made onto the grid but when the CRT class was announced the BQR team started testing the Kawasaki engine in the Inmotec chassis (some even claimed that they were evaluating the old 800cc engine of BMW origins) and the FTR chassis before plumping in for the FTR.

Yonny Hernandez, the Columbian rider has surprised everyone at Qatar by finishing fourteenth in the race and picking up points.  The other rider Ivan Silva did not do as well.  And now for the GP at Jerez while Hernandez’s steed will remain unchanged, the bike of Silva will feature the Inmotec chassis which is a combination of carbon fibre and aluminium.  In fact, it is being touted that in the long term the BQR team will switch to Inmotec because they have said in the past that they will build an all Spanish developed team.  Needless to say, the engine will be the question mark since there are no motorcycle makers of consequence in Spain.