Romain Febvre – Kawasaki’s only major title hope and $50k frames!

A few years ago, Kawasaki was living the dream with Eli Tomac winning in America, Romain Febvre challenging for an MXGP world title and Jonathan Rea winning in World Superbike.

Now, the landscape is very different and Kawasaki’s entire success at the highest level is rested solely on Romain Febvre shoulders. Febvre is carrying Kawasaki single-handedly, the WSB side isn’t enjoying the same success and Kawasaki USA couldn’t even field a single factory rider in SMX after a disastrous end to their 2025 season with Jason Anderson exiting during the season and Jorge Prado never feeling comfortable on the bike and now both sides mutually agreeing not to race SMX.

With a 26 point lead and two rounds to go, the pressure on Romain Febvre is huge, the Frenchman is an entire companies hope of some solace and glory in a season to forget outside of MXGP.

This, of course, has been a work in progress, Febvre came oh-so-close to a title in MXGP back in 2021 in that enthralling championship decider at Mantova, but it was Herlings and KTM who prevailed. Now Febvre has the best chance he might have for the rest of his career to get that second world title, this, after riding one-off frames up to 50k as he got comfortable on his factory Kawasaki.

Febvre and Kawaski have put so much into this, for both, they have ten days to make it all worthwhile in China and then Australia.

To underline the work that has went into this title assault, test rider for Kawasaki Takeshi Katsuya said in an interview with Swapmoto of Febvre and the development of the bike and the development that went into it:

“First year, Febvre ran the full factory frame and they are very expensive. So, in 2023 he ran the full factory frame, in 2024 he ran the production frame. So since that, everything is the production. So his frame, his swing arm is production. So it’s the same rule as the US, you know. But that’s what I wanted to do anyway, because the factory frame, I mean, that ended in 2023. He was winning a lot of races. But, you know, everybody goes, oh, because he has factory frame. And, okay, that factory frame was really good. But we came up with the production frame. It was close enough.”