It isn’t exactly new news, but now at least it’s official.
Valentino Rossi’s team manager Davide Brivio is leaving Yamaha after nineteen years with the company and will be substituted by Massimo “Maio” Meregalli, as everyone was expecting he would.
Meregalli will be joining the Yamaha Factory MotoGP Team in the role of Team Director (a brand new title?) and will work together with Team Manager Wilco Zeelenberg to form an experienced and unified (does that mean no wall and the end of two separate teams?) management team for 2011 and beyond.
Brivio is going to turn manager like Carlo Pernat, but has confirmed that he hasn’t made any deals with Valentino Rossi (Brivio brought Rossi to Yamaha) to follow him to Ducati in the near future, but hopes to still collaborate with his former rider and his company VR/46.
We’re also expecting that Daniele Romagnoli, Jorge Lorenzo’s former team manager in 2009, will be returning to the factory team in MotoGP after spending a stint with Poncharal’s Moto2 Tech3 team as Raffaele de Rosa’s crew chief, but we’ll find out if we’re right when Yamaha announces their team organisation on Monday November 8th at Valencia.