American team could withdraw from MotoGP
"Well, we're not a bank. So right now, it doesn't look good," confirmed 'King Kenny', a triple 500cc world champion. "That could change overnight, but at the moment I can say that there's too much funding that's not there… We have a [target] budget that we can do this season with, and we're short on that budget by about 20%, I would say, right now."
"Well, I think that Dorna help all the smaller teams in one way or another, if they can. There's a limit to what they can do, as well. Now, if the cost gets above the limit that they can help, and we can't do it, we're not going to do it. And I'm going to make that decision in a week," underlined Roberts. "That's going to be largely sitting down with Dorna, of course, and Honda, and saying, 'Okay, guys, here's the bottom line. We can't fix this. If it can't be fixed, I'm out'. Unfortunately, that's a decision I've got to make after the IRTA test, because I don't really want to ship to the first grand prix if I know I'm not going to do it."
"There are sponsors in Formula One that pay three times as much for a sticker on a car, as what they could have a whole MotoGP team for," he claimed. "The only thing I can judge from that is that the hospitality at Formula One is really what they want, not selling their product. Because you can't, you cannot, argue the point that that is getting to more people than motorcycles. No way. You just can't do it. You couldn't stand up in front of a corporate board and say, 'Look, this sticker on a Formula One car is going to get a lot more press than having a fully-backed two-rider Team Roberts in MotoGP, for the same amount of money'. You cannot say that. Because the TV stats in MotoGP are going up, and Formula One's going down. It's the craziest thing for us to be in this position now, while MotoGP is going up so much. I'm going to make a decision next week, and we're going to go or no go. It's just odd. We don't know."