The unimaginable is becoming reality: Ten Kate is leaving Yamaha for a Chinese brand

Since mid-July, regular readers of SPEEDWEEK.com have known that the Chinese motorbike manufacturer QJ Motor is looking for a new partner for the Supersport World Championship. This is not entirely a voluntary move, but is due to circumstances. Since the factory team’s entry in 2024, a subsidiary of the Puccetti team has been responsible for developing the race bike and managing the racing programme. However, Manuel Puccetti’s team has also been running the Kawasaki works team in the Superbike and Supersport World Championships since 2025 and therefore has more than enough on its plate.

QJ intends to invest more in the Supersport World Championship in future and is in the process of setting up its own racing department at its huge factory in China – making the company an attractive and lucrative ally.

In early September, the racing manager in charge at the time was sent to the SBK weekend at Magny-Cours, where she held talks with the Orelac Ducati, PTR Triumph, AS Yamaha and Motoxracing Yamaha teams.

QJ Motor contacted Ten Kate

The following week saw the first telephone call with Ten Kate, the most successful team in the Supersport World Championship, followed shortly afterwards by a visit to the racing team in Nieuwleusen.

As SPEEDWEEK.com discovered, a delegation from Ten Kate has since visited the QJ factory, and a multi-year contract has now been signed. For Ten Kate, this is a huge step: after many years with Honda, first in the Supersport World Championship and later also in the Superbike World Championship, the switch to Yamaha took place in 2019. The Supersport World Championship was won in 2021 and 2022 with Dominique Aegerter, and in 2025 with Stefano Manzi.

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Events have been unfolding at a rapid pace in Estoril over the past few days. Ten Kate informed Yamaha that the partnership would end after this season. It’s obvious to anyone that the contract offered by QJ must be very attractive, not only from a financial perspective but also from a sporting one.

QJ Motor investiert viel in die Supersport-WM

Foto: QJ Motor

Chinese motorbike industry making its mark

ZX Moto has demonstrated just how powerful the Chinese motorbike industry has become: together with the Evan Bros team, they secured second place in the World Championship with Valentin Debise in their very first season in the Supersport class.

Towards the end of the 2027 season, CF Moto will enter the World Superbike Championship. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that this is also QJ Motor’s medium-term plan. From next year, they will have Ten Kate Racing as a partner, a team with the necessary racing experience that can achieve a great deal with the right factory support – in 2007, the team secured Honda’s last World Superbike title with rider James Toseland.

The first rider for the QJ works team has been confirmed

Last year’s World Championship runner-up and current third-placed rider, Can Öncü, will remain with Ten Kate for 2027, thereby also switching from Yamaha to QJ Motor. The second rider has not yet been confirmed, though Moto2 rider Zonta van den Goorbergh currently stands the best chance of securing the seat. What is clear, however, is that QJ Motor will be working exclusively with Ten Kate in 2027.

It will be interesting to see how Ten Kate’s racing activities with QJ affect its in-house Yamaha Pro Shop in the medium to long term. A visionary might well conclude that QJ is aiming for something similar in order to capture market share and boost its own profile in racing.

QJ Motor was founded in 1985; at its state-of-the-art factory in Wenling, 500 km south of Shanghai, 1.2 million motorbikes and 2 million engines are produced annually. QJ is part of the Geely Group, which employs around 120,000 people and whose portfolio also includes the car brands Volvo, Polestar, Lynk & Co, Lotus, Smart and Zeekr.