The 2022 MotoGP season starts in less than a week, and I?m well excited about it. In fact I?m probably more excited about it than I?ve been about anything in quite a while. And so are all my mates (both of them), who simply refuse to talk about anything else at the moment. It was during one of our weekly lager-lubricated MotoGP chats that we got on about Kawasaki? and how it?s a shame that we haven?t seen them on a GP grid, in an official capacity, since 2009.

And despite all of us being big MotoGP fans (and me being a bit of a self-confessed Kawasaki fan-boy), none of us really knew why they disappeared. So, in exchange for a round of drinks, I promised them I?d use my journalistic skills, as well as my long list of contacts in the motorcycle industry, to get to the bottom of it.
And I knew just the bloke to talk to. Martin Lambert, PR Manager for Kawasaki Motors Europe, has been at Kawasaki for 25 years. There?s nothing the man doesn?t know about Kawasaki; in fact, if you let him, he could literally bore you to sleep with chat about the Eitaibashi Bridge, one of Kawasaki?s oldest bridges. Yawn.

We?re not interested in that though. What we really wanted to know was why on earth did Kawasaki, who had one of the best looking, best sounding, best performing bikes on the grid, decide to pull out of MotoGP. So I called Mr Lambert up, and had a chat?

44T: Before we start talking about MotoGP, can you tell me why a company like Kawasaki, who make massive s...