Musquin and NGS settle out of court
By Mannix Devlin on 22nd Jul 09
WORLD MX2 Championship leader, Marvin Musquin will officially race for KTM this weekend in a crucial round of the French Motocross Championship at Iffendic and also contest the remaining four GPs on orange machinery.
There was no decision in the court case between the French rider and the NGS Honda team on Tuesday afternoon (July 21). The judge at the Rouen Court of Appeal agreed to give the lawyers on all sides of the affair more time to try to end the whole sorry mess out of court!
The appeal against the decision of the High Court in Le Havre, which ordered Marvin to return to NGS Honda and sever all contact to KTM France and KTM Austria until January 1, 2010, was scheduled for Tuesday but both sides requested an adjournment in an effort to negotiate an out-of-court settlement. The judge agreed to this adjournment.
Then late on Tuesday evening came news that a financial arrangements had been thrashed out between Musquin and the NGS Honda team so that the rider was free to official join KTM and contest the race at Iffendic this weekend where he, Gautier Paulin and Steven Frossard are engaged in a three-way battle for the French national title.
After that, it is on to the Belgian GP over the weekend of August 1/2 at Lommel, where Musquin goes to the start-line with a 13-point advantage over Gautier Paulin at the top of the World MX2 table.
No details of the settlement have been made public, but it was always on the cards that Musquin would have to compensate NGS Honda for alleged breach of contract, so it was simply a matter of the scale of the financial settlement which the teenager will pay to NGS Honda, a sum which KTM will, presumably, have to cover.
There is also the question of where Honda sits in the whole affair. It is not unreasonable to assume that Honda will feel that it has been deprived of a potential world championship and could also seek compensation for this loss.