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The announcement every one interested in GP500 and WSBK Has been expecting was made today at Phillip Island.
The Red Bull Yamaha Team announced that their second rider for next year would be Noriyuki Haga. Red Bull have been after Haga for several years.
Peter Clifford the team manager said \"We\'ve been talking to Yamaha about Haga for three years. \"We\'ve always recognized that Haga is a Yamaha rider and has been contracted to them for a number of years. He won the Japanese Superbike Championship and then came to the World Superbike Championship with Yamaha, so we would never approach Haga directly. But we showed an interest in him three years ago, and have been talking about it since then. It\'s taken this long for Yamaha to feel the time was right for him to come to the 500 class. But the deal has really only had any kind of certainty over the last couple of weeks.\"
Haga has ridden a 500 on a number of occasions but in a very limited way. He will have the same learning curve to go through as McCoy but having McCoy as a teammate will be a help.
Peter Clifford went on to say \"I believe there are 10 out of the 16 circuits we\'ll run on [next year] that he hasn\'t been on, Of course, he\'s raced the 500 once three years ago in Japan where he finished third, and that\'s an incredible performance. Other than that, I believe he\'s only had a very brief outing or two at the Yamaha test track. So we\'ve got a lot of testing to do, and we plan to start that in November. The number of tests depends on how he gets on. It could be as many as eight tests, but we would hope it was less than that because it burns everybody out...the riders, mechanics -- the whole team. But we\'re prepared to do what it takes to make him comfortable.\"
Clifford is clearly excited at the prospect of having Haga on the team \"He\'s a racer. A pure racer,\" Clifford concluded. \"That\'s what we see in Garry McCoy, and that\'s what we see in Haga. You can\'t put a price on that.\"
