Yamaha has announced that it will withdraw from World Superbike racing at the end of the 2011 season, citing financial reasons. The official Yamaha World Superbike team has been running without any sponsors just as the MotoGP team. However, MotoGP gets money from the factory in Japan directly while the Superbike team is funded by the associates of the company in Europe. The financial crisis in the world markets has not gone away fully and this has impacted severely on the sale of motorcycles in Europe. With no sponsor likely to appear, the writing on the wall was clear. Yamaha quits at a time when it is actually doing quite well in the World Superbike championship. Both its riders Eugene Laverty and Marco Melandri have been on the podium a few times and the latter in fact is placed in a very good place in the overall championship points. Yamaha may however provide racing kits to interested parties just as they are doing with the World Supersport category. Melandri must consider himself extremely unlucky. His effort at Ducati was terrible and he signed for Kawasaki in MotoGP only to find that the team had withdrawn from MotoGP. Efforts of Dorna produced a single bike team which ran as Hayate and Melandri had some decent results on that. Now when he has just announced that he would remain in World Superbikes with Yamaha, the news of Yamaha’s withdrawal has come. However based on this year’s performance it can be assumed that both Melandri and Laverty could find rides for next year’s championship.