Moto Rapido Ducati team owner Steve Moore believes the returning John Hopkins is a perfect fit for his Hampshire-based MCE British Superbike team and says the British-born American should be in a position to win races in 2017 and compleyte his ‘unfinished business’ in the championship.

Hopkins moved to Tommy Hill’s team last year after putting Moore’s Panigale on the podium at the end of 2015 and the forthright boss, known as Wilf for reasons best kept to himself, says it was a mistake to let him go, but that has been remedied and now he has a guy who really understands what the bike needs to run at the front.

“John is genuinely the only guy we have put on the bike who has taken straight to it. It needs an aggressive rider, someone who likes and is comfortable with a stiff chassis, a torquey engine that needs its neck wringing,” said Moore, speaking to bikesportnews.com.

“There aren’t many of those riders around. I was looking through some data and when he first got on the bike for the test in 2015 at Brands during a trackday lunch break, it was 28 seconds between rolling out of pitlane and taking it to 100 per cent throttle. He just rides like that all the time.

“I was expecting five or six laps of seeing how it felt, but he was at full brake pressure into Graham Hill Bend on lap one, fully committed and that’s what you want. He is also familar with riding at the front of a fast pack, which is the idea I suppose.”

Hopkins didn’t have a great time of it with Hill’s team and he wasn’t able to get the most out of the Yamaha R1 - a bike which needs all its ducks in a row to be fast.

“We did have a conversation halfway through this year, but I didn’t want to be the sort of team owner that steals riders, so we made a plan to talk as soon as everyone was out of contract. We stayed friends after 2015, he gets on very well with the team, he has the right sense of humour, he is the perfect fit for us,” Moore added.

“He should be pretty at home with the bike as it will feel very similar to the one he left. We’ve made it more stable and there is a bit more power now with different exhausts and a 2017 engine spec. It will be about 95 per cent of what the factory WorldSBK bikes have. They have a few more bits in their top end as they rev a little higher than ours but they are also limited to how many they can use by the rules. We are limited financially…

“There is no reason by John can’t be at the front. He proved we can do it by getting on the podium at the last round in 2015 so we should at least be expecting to do that again. We have got a plan in place which is worthwhile for him to be winning races.

“It was definitely a mistake letting him go at the end of 2015 but we weren’t in a position to continue; this year we are.”