Sete Gibernau and his Ducati Desmosedici GP9 showed up at Jerez della Frontera IRTA test with an all new livery.
Gone is the elegant white-gold-and black color scheme used during winter testing, his bike is now sporting a white- green-red and blue colored livery.
The Grupo Francisco Hernando Onde 2000 Team has now become Nuova Edificacion 2000 and also missing is the the name of their second sponsor, Equatorial Guinea, however the new color scheme is exactly the same as the flag of the former Central African Spanish colony .
There were a lot of rumblings and grumblings in the Spanish press, including several important and influential political newspapers who were questioning this strange and unusual union and many MotoGP fans from around the world found it extremely distasteful that a country run by dictator Teodor Obiang Nguema, who rates 11th in the list of the World’s Worst Dictators was sponsoring a MotoGP bike.
Francisco Hernando, a property developer, known in Spain as “El Porcero” is an extremely shrewd man.
He probably wants to avoid any further bad press and someone investigating his business affairs and has removed the Equatorial Guinea name, thus thwarting any further public questioning: using the theory out of sight, out of mind.