Exclusive Interview: Inside BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha with Izan Guevara, Tony Arbolino & Alex De Angelis

Less than two years after BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha entered Moto2 as the final link in Yamaha’s pathway towards the premier class, the project may already be preparing to deliver its first MotoGP rider.

Izan Guevara has emerged as the leading candidate to join Prima Pramac Yamaha in 2027 alongside Toprak Razgatlıoğlu, as uncertainty continues to surround Jack Miller’s future with the team. The possibility has prompted predictable debate over whether the young Mallorcan has done enough in Moto2 to justify a premier class promotion.

For those who remember the almost untouchable rider who tore through Moto3 on his way to the 2022 World Championship, however, Guevara’s return to prominence may feel less premature than overdue. For those only beginning to take notice during his current Moto2 campaign, the question is much simpler: who is Izan Guevara, and why is Yamaha reportedly prepared to place its faith in him?

His current position cannot be separated from the decision he made at the end of 2024. After five years with CFMOTO Aspar, the structure within which he had won the European Talent Cup, the Moto3 Junior World Championship and eventually the Moto3 World Championship, Guevara left for a team that had never contested a Moto2 race.

His first two seasons in the intermediate class had been marred by injury, crashes and a loss of confidence that threatened to derail one of the most decorated junior careers in the paddock. Less than a year before his first Moto2 victory, Guevara was still attempting to prove that the rider who had dominated Moto3 had not disappeared.

BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha could offer no history in the category and no guarantee that its wider ambitions would translate into results. What it did offer was an entirely new environment, backed by a manufacturer attempting to rebuild its place in Grand Prix racing and an independent team that had just reached the summit of MotoGP.

By the end of its maiden season, Guevara had returned to the top step of a Grand Prix podium. Now, less than two years after entrusting his career to the project, the same partnership may be preparing to carry him into MotoGP.

A History of Success

By the time BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha rolled its bikes into the Moto2 paddock, Pramac Racing's premier class squad had already pushed the idea of an independent MotoGP team as far as it could go. Across its final four seasons with Ducati, Pramac had become the benchmark of satellite success. From 2021 to 2024, it was named Best Independent Team every year, in 2023 it won the Teams’ World Championship and In 2024, with Jorge Martín, Pramac delivered the first modern-era MotoGP riders’ title for a non-factory team.

For most teams, it would have been a no-brainer to pursue that continued success and remain with the dominant manufacturer. Thankfully for MotoGP, Pramac Racing is not just any other team. Instead, they chose to take the leap and invest in the future of Grand Prix racing. At the end of 2024, it closed a 20-year chapter with Ducati and signed a new multi-year agreement with Yamaha, becoming what the manufacturer described as a full partner rather than a conventional satellite team; effectively, a second factory squad in MotoGP.

It was a bold move for both sides, but one that carved a road towards unprecedented potential. For Yamaha, it meant gaining a partner with a proven record of winning and, crucially, of developing riders. For Pramac, it meant stepping into a project where it could help shape the comeback of a motorcycle racing giant rather than simply adding more red ‘silverware’ to an already overflowing cabinet.

To understand why a Moto2 team sits at the centre of that decision, you must first look to Yamaha’s wider picture. For years, Yamaha’s BLU CRU programme had been building its own ecosystem; R3 cups in Europe and Asia, the Oceania Junior Cup in Australia and the FIM R3 BLU CRU World Cup had all become recognised steps on the Road to MotoGP. Young riders could climb towards world championship racing almost entirely aboard Yamaha machinery; the missing piece was a box in the Grand Prix paddock between those junior categories and MotoGP itself. BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha Moto2 was designed to be exactly that: the final step in the pyramid before the premier class.

The team did not begin with two inexperienced prospects at the beginning of straightforward journeys towards MotoGP. On one side of the box was Izan Guevara, a champion whose raw, instinctive talent had once made the lightweight class look small around him. On the other was Tony Arbolino, a double vice-champion known across the paddock as one of Moto2’s most ruthless reference points. He had built a reputation as the shark willing to go bar to bar with some of Grand Prix racing’s greatest talents and come out on top; a rider who smells opportunity in any conditions.

Holding it all together is Alex De Angelis, a 20-year Grand Prix veteran turned team manager, tasked with welding a new structure, a new group of people and a demanding technical package into something capable of fighting for trophies from round one.

Naturally, expectations were immediate. Pramac had just reached the summit of MotoGP as an independent team, Yamaha was investing in a direct pathway towards its premier-class operation and both Guevara and Arbolino had already demonstrated that they were capable of winning at World Championship level.

“Everybody Has One Target: Win” - Alex De Angelis

Crucial to any glimmer of success in a Grand Prix paddock is the person running the box, and in that sense BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha has struck gold. In Alex De Angelis, the team found not only someone carrying decades of experience as a Grand Prix racer, but a charismatic figurehead and a dedication that speaks volumes about his passion for and belief in the project.

When De Angelis stopped racing full-time, he did not immediately imagine himself returning to the paddock from the other side of the pit wall.

“I stopped being a rider many years ago, before COVID actually,” he said when we spoke at the 2025 Australian Grand Prix.

After stepping away, however, it did not take long for him to understand how much of himself remained attached to Grand Prix racing.

“After a few months outside of this work, I immediately missed it.”

He found his way back on his own terms; rather than waiting for a World Championship position to appear, De Angelis began managing a team in the Italian championship, wanting to learn the demands of the role at a national level so that, if an opportunity eventually arrived in the Grand Prix paddock, he would not enter it “completely new”.

During the 2024 San Marino Grand Prix at Misano, Pramac team director Gino Borsoi offered him the opportunity to lead the new Moto2 operation.

“When Gino called me in the Misano race to propose this kind of job, I was really, really happy,” 

“When somebody like Gino, especially, calls you to offer you what really was a dream, it is the best thing that can happen in life.”

The scale of the opportunity was accompanied by an equally considerable weight of expectation.

“In this team, the expectation was really, really high,”

 “This was quite difficult for me because, as I said, I am new in this kind of job. But, on the other hand, I am really lucky because I have Gino next to me any time I need.”

His experience as a rider shaped the way he approached the role. When De Angelis described what a team manager actually does, he did not begin with contracts, strategy meetings or spreadsheets but rather about the people involved in the team.

“To be manager is like, whatever you need, call Alex”

 “This is for a rider, for mechanics, for everybody. Everybody comes to me and asks me something, or if I see something I can do to help, I will help them any way I can because everybody has one target: win.”

For De Angelis, the relationships inside the garage were the foundation of which performance can be built upon.

“Beautiful relationships are the base to get what we need, to win… I am focused [on staying] well with the team [and] to understand the problems of the riders.”

“If they also need to talk about their private life, I am here, because I have been a rider for 20 years in the World Championship…I know what they need from my experiences in the past. I try to give them what I really needed at that time.”

That understanding was particularly valuable in a garage where neither rider had arrived without complications. Arbolino was leaving one of Moto2’s most established teams to gamble on an operation with no history. Guevara was leaving the only professional structure he had ever known while attempting to recover from two seasons that had stripped away much of the confidence with which he once raced. Before De Angelis could help either rider chase victories, the team first had to understand the motorcycle beneath them.

Balancing the Boscoscuro

In a class as ruthless as Moto2, where every rider uses the same Triumph 765cc engine and identical tyres, the chassis is not just another line item on a parts list; it gives a team its technical identity. For much of the category’s modern history, that identity was painted in Kalex grey. 

At its peak, Kalex supplied the overwhelming majority of the grid, won all but one race in a season and occupied the vast majority of the leading positions in the championship. As recently as the early 2020s, more than 20 riders in a 30-bike field were competing on Kalex machinery, while almost every riders’ champion of the previous decade had won aboard one.

Once again, Pramac stepped away from the safe option. Rather than joining the bulk of the grid on Kalex machinery, the team chose the Boscoscuro chassis for its maiden Moto2 season. The Italian manufacturer grew from the old Speed Up project and has spent recent years cutting into Kalex’s monopoly with a considerably smaller fleet and budget.

On paper and on the timing screens, Boscoscuro is not necessarily an outsider as its motorcycles have won races and fought for championships. Within the paddock, however, it remains a more specialised tool in a category filled with proven all-rounders. That was how Tony Arbolino, who had spent most of his professional career on Kalex machinery, described it to me.

“The bike is not a general bike”

“It is a more strict bike. The window is really small to make a good bike or not a really good bike, so you need to work a lot in the details to find a bike that is good for you.”

At certain circuits, that work placed the motorcycle directly inside its optimum window.

“Many tracks, it is pretty good, the bike,” Arbolino explained.

“And many tracks, you need to struggle a bit more. That is the most difficult thing.”

What mattered to him was the mentality surrounding it. Boscoscuro continued to develop the package, and when the team found its narrow operating window, Arbolino believed it possessed a motorcycle capable of winning in any conditions.

“Boscoscuro is pushing a lot every year to try to find a good bike. The mentality is there. We just need to put everything together to try to make the best bike for us.”

For Guevara, the learning curve was equally steep, although framed by very different expectations. He joined BLU CRU Pramac with the reputation of a rider capable of making categories bend around him and admitted that he initially expected the technical transition to be simpler.

“For me, the Boscoscuro chassis, it is a little bit of a difficult adaptation…I expected a better adaptation to this chassis.”

Having already endured two difficult Moto2 seasons, another complicated adaptation could easily have deepened the doubts surrounding Guevara. Izan’s impressive mental fortitude forbade this phenomenon from transpiring, with the Mallorcan instead working to tame the mechanical bull.

“I’ve worked day by day to improve the setting on the bike,” he said. “Now I feel good and I’m battling for good results.”

It’s true that early races were defined less by outright speed than by finding what the motorcycle demanded from him. By the time Guevara reached the podium in Indonesia and later won at Valencia, the same chassis had become the foundation of some of the most complete performances of his intermediate-class career.

A Boscoscuro does not flatter every rider; when it sits outside its narrow operating window, there is little ambiguity, and in a category as competitive as Moto2 there is nowhere to conceal the consequences. That was what made BLU CRU Pramac’s first rider pairing so well judged; Guevara and Arbolino did not require identical conditions to be fast, nor did they respond to adversity in the same way. One arrived as an established reference capable of guiding a new technical operation and the other arrived attempting to recover the instincts that had once made his trajectory towards MotoGP appear inevitable.

Izan Guevara

Izan Guevara possesses one of the most decorated junior careers of any rider in the Moto2 paddock. For all his charm and truly endearing personality off the motorcycle, he becomes a killer once his helmet is on and the lights go out. Perhaps the culmination of his talent is best seen from his performance at Phillip Island in 2022, the same circuit at which we spoke three years later. 

The first time Guevara raced there, he left as a World Champion. At just 18 years old, the Mallorcan sealed the 2022 Moto3 title with victory on his Australian debut.

“I have great memories here in Australia,” he said. “I won the championship in 2022 with an amazing race. I won the race here, my first time when I came here.”

That weekend did not merely make Guevara a champion but gave him a reputation that would follow him into every garage he entered afterwards. His progression had been developed through the Spanish talent ladder and sharpened inside the Aspar structure that became his paddock home. He won the European Talent Cup, the Moto3 Junior World Championship and the Moto3 World Championship all in Aspar red.

“I joined the Aspar team in 2019, and I was with them for many years”

By the conclusion of his 2022 campaign, he had made the Moto3 field appear almost powerless to stop him. Guevara won 7 races, stood on the podium 12 times and sealed the championship with 2 rounds remaining. His speed was accompanied by the freedom of a rider who appeared to trust every instinct available to him, something he struggled to maintain when he reached the intermediate-class.

“When I got to Moto2, it was so difficult… I started with too many crashes, and I lost my confidence.”

An injury disrupted the beginning of his rookie season before repeated crashes and difficult results complicated his adaptation further. In a paddock where young riders compete from week to week not only for points but for the continuation of their careers, belief can become conditional very quickly.

“With the injury, with everything, too many people didn’t trust me,” Guevara said.

More concerningly, that uncertainty had reached the rider himself.

“I didn’t have confidence in myself… but I never gave up in this situation,” he said. “And I battled with myself for where I am now.”

That battle eventually led him towards the most significant change of his professional career since winning the Moto3 title: leaving what was then GASGAS Aspar.

“After five years with Aspar, I needed a new challenge.”

Moving to BLU CRU Pramac meant walking away from the people with whom he had grown from a junior prospect into a World Champion. It also meant replacing the familiar Kalex package with a Boscoscuro inside a team still constructing almost every element of its Moto2 operation. The decision was helped by an existing relationship with Gino Borsoi, who had worked as sporting director at Aspar before joining Pramac.

“I spoke a lot with Gino before arriving at this team, and it’s an incredible project,” Guevara explained. “Yamaha has good confidence in me, and for me it’s a pleasure to stay here in the BLU CRU project and in the Yamaha family.”

“We had a really good relationship,” he said of Borsoi. “He always had good confidence in me, and he trusted a lot in me and my potential.”

That trust was not immediately rewarded with straightforward results. Guevara still needed to adapt to the Boscoscuro, improve his qualifying and rediscover the confidence that had previously allowed him to race so freely. Indonesia was the first weekend at which the work became visible on the results sheet.

“It’s very important for both parts [the team and me]” he said of his first podium with the team.

“Because I worked hard the whole season for this podium, and for me, for myself, it’s important for my family.”

He also identified the area that had repeatedly made his Sundays more difficult.

“The biggest problem for me is the normal Saturdays,” Guevara said, referring to qualifying and the importance of producing an unobstructed lap when the field compresses into fractions of a second. In Indonesia, it finally came together:

“It was a good Saturday…Now I work alone, and I improved so much to better my qualifying.”

Naturally, as I sat in front of the entire BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha team in the demountable building ‘office’ of Phillip Island, I had to ask the obvious, if slightly delicate question of whether or not his desire to reach the premier class was in sight, although Guevara remained reluctant to rush towards it.

“At the end, all riders, the objective, the final goal is always MotoGP,” he said. “This is a good goal, but first I need a good year in Moto2.”

By any measure it can be said that Guevara has done exactly that this season; heading into the summer break he sits an incredible 2nd in the standings; only preceding Moto2 veteran Manuel Gonzalez. Perhaps even more impressively Guevara has repeatedly outscored the two rookies already guaranteed to graduate to the premier class, Aspar prodigies David Alonso and Dani Holgado, who remain behind him in fourth and fifth respectively. Another glimpse into Izan’s mindset can explain how he has managed to supercede all expectations:

“For me, the most important thing is to be happy again,” Guevara said. “I get back to being happy, to feel confident. I get back to having fun riding the bike.”

“I get back to this feeling. With this feeling I get good results.”

Tony Arbolino

There is a steadiness to Tony Arbolino that becomes apparent almost immediately. He is well-spoken, level-headed and so effortlessly composed that it borders on intimidating, although none of it appears manufactured…then his visor drops and the tone changes.

A Moto3 and Moto2 vice-champion, Arbolino rides with an edge that makes him difficult to manage and even harder to ignore. In 2023, when Pedro Acosta established himself as the benchmark of the intermediate class, Arbolino was the only rider capable of going bar to bar with him across the season and making it stick consistently (though an argument could be made for Fermin Aldeguer’s sudden dominance at the climax of the season). 

Before making the switch to Pramac, Arbolino had spent years inside ELF Marc VDS Racing, one of Moto2’s most established organisations. Leaving that security required believing that a project with no results behind it could offer something his previous environment no longer did. 

When Arbolino explained the decision, much like Alex De Angelis, he began with people rather than machinery:

“First of all, the people always inspired me, and I believed a lot in the project since day one.”

 “For me, it was such an easy move.”

“It was interesting to change because, after some years, [MarcVDS and I] achieved as much as we could. It was a good journey… I decided to move here for the project, for everything around it. The people always interested me a lot. That’s why I moved here.”

His arrival gave the new team an immediate yardstick as Arbolino understood the expectations attached to his record, however so he remained pragmatic about the difficulty of producing results in Moto2.

“I think it’s not an easy category…Every season it changes a lot of things. Even at this time, the level is pretty high, and tyre compounds change every race. The bike is becoming a bit tougher compared to past years, so it’s not really easy to achieve things.”

“But, in the end, we are still able to make some good things, and this makes me happy.”

Those good things began early; at the Circuit of the Americas, Arbolino delivered BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha its first podium in only its third Grand Prix. Long known as Lo Squalo di Garbagnate, the Shark of Garbagnate, for his ability in wet and unpredictable races, Arbolino found his opportunity in the changing conditions of Texas.

“The conditions were pretty difficult… In difficult conditions, I’m always shining a bit more. It was brilliant. The team was so, so happy. The project got a boost of motivation in that era.”

Another strong opportunity followed in Japan, although a lingering hand injury prevented him from completing the weekend as expected and eventually required surgery.

“We had the opportunity in Japan, but then I couldn’t finish because of my right hand,” he said. “Japan also had a really good result. Things are there. It’s not easy to always put everything together to reach things, but the most important base is there.”

The injury became a significant constraint because Arbolino did not initially recognise its severity. He had carried the discomfort through several rounds and found himself blaming his adaptation to the motorcycle for sensations that were instead coming from his body.

“I have to say that I had to do the surgery before because it hurt me in many races during the season…I didn’t believe it was that bad.”

“I was struggling a bit more sometimes with the bike, so I was thinking more on that side, not my hand side.”

Surgery addressed the underlying issue, although stiffness and pain continued to require management.

“Now we have recovered 100 per cent, but everything is stiffer, so you always have some pain. We’re still managing well.”

Arbolino’s importance to the project extended beyond the points he delivered as his status being one of Moto2’s most established references also gave Guevara an experienced teammate from whom he could learn during his adaptation to the new motorcycle.

“Tony is a good rider,” Guevara said.

“He battled for the championship in 2023. He has a lot of speed, and I improved a lot from him.”

Most importantly, Arbolino never treated that experience as permission to become comfortable.

“Every season there is something new. Every season is completely different” 

“If you check lap times over two years, it changes so much, so fast, that you cannot even compare. You need to become a better rider every year and try to be better.”

His results may not have provided the triumphant season anticipated when the partnership was announced, but his presence gave the new team technical knowledge, an immediate podium and an internal standard against which its progress could be measured. For Guevara, that benchmark formed another part of the environment in which his confidence gradually returned.

Guevara to MotoGP?

BLU CRU Pramac Yamaha’s first Moto2 season produced results that would have been considerable for any new operation. Arbolino gave the team its first podium in only its third Grand Prix, before Guevara added another in Indonesia and won the final race of the year in Valencia.

That victory earned Guevara an opportunity to test Yamaha’s MotoGP machine. Now, heading into the summer break, he sits second in the Moto2 World Championship and appears increasingly likely to join Prima Pramac Yamaha in 2027; especially as rumours intensify surrounding Tech3’ KTM’s alleged signing of Australian rider, Senna Agius, filling the passport-vacuum that Pramac’s current rider, Jack Miller, threatens to leave behind.

It is easy to remember Guevara as the naturally gifted teenager who made Moto3 look almost effortless but his progress since joining BLU CRU Pramac has required arduous effort and unwavering durability to alleviate the weight he carried upon his shoulders. He left the only professional structure he had known, adapted to another motorcycle that did not immediately suit him and continued working through the qualifying problems and damaged confidence that had followed him across his first two Moto2 seasons.

None of his current success has arrived simply because the talent miraculously returned; Guevara has had to work relentlessly to make himself competitive again, gradually understanding the Boscoscuro, improving the Saturdays that had repeatedly compromised his races and rebuilding enough confidence to trust his instincts once the lights went out.

BLU CRU Pramac deserves enormous credit for recognising what remained beneath those difficult seasons and giving Guevara an environment in which he could properly access once more. Equally, Guevara has rewarded that faith through the less visible work required long before the podiums and championship position arrived.

Whether Yamaha ultimately places him in Pramac’s premier-class garage remains to be confirmed, but Guevara has made an extraordinarily convincing case. Not only through the brilliance that made him a World Champion in the first place, but through the perseverance, humility and sheer amount of work it has taken to become a leading Moto2 rider again.