Suzuki’s Hunter Lawrence wins a world championship moto in France at the weekend and still doesn’t have a deal for 2018. It’s a worrying time for the world stage as the Mx2 teams are getting smaller with Suzuki pulling their full-strength factory team and Monster Energy pulling budget from the MX2 programme too, hitting the Kawasaki team hard which has today announced it will close. That leaves Adam Sterry without a ride.

Also rumour has it that Honda will only have one rider in the class too. So it could be a field of orange and white bikes that rolled out of the same factory racing each other. Yamaha will still have a strong presence as its factory effort is run by separate teams.