Yamaha’s World Technician Grand Prix to return in 2025

The World Technician Grand Prix (WTGP) is an international competition where Yamaha Motor’s best motorcycle technicians compete against each other with their skills, and boasts the longest history of such a contest in the motorcycle industry.

Although Yamaha was unable to hold the event over the last few years due to Covid, it is scheduled to return in 2025, where one of the roughly 34,600 Yamaha-certified technicians will be crowned the No. 1 Yamaha motorcycle technician.

“As a competition expressly for motorcycle technicians, the WTGP has the industry’s longest history and those that qualify for it consider it quite an honor,” explains Yukio Tanaka, who organizes the event. The pandemic put a hold on running the competition, and it has been postponed or canceled since 2018, resulting in a five-year hiatus. Still, Yamaha technicians around the world have continued to hone their skills through their everyday work and online YTA training sessions during that gap period. Plus, new national champions were crowned in countries that were able to hold NTGPs during the pandemic.

Yamaha says the goal for its service departments is “One-to-One Service.” Three factors lie at the core of this standard: high maintenance skills, expert product knowledge, and reliable customer support provided by Yamaha’s technicians. To manifest these factors at a high level, Yamaha Motor established the Yamaha Technical Academy (YTA) as a globally standardized training program for its technicians.

There are approximately 34,600 Yamaha technicians around the globe, and the first competition in which they pit the skills and knowledge honed through their daily work against their colleagues is the National Technician Grand Prix (NTGP) held in each country. Those who emerge as the winners of their respective NTGPs qualify to compete for the No. 1 title at the World Technician Grand Prix (WTGP), which has been traditionally held every two years since 2002.

The WTGP puts entrants up against a wider range of more practical skills and knowledge tests. These include the Technical Skills section; where participants compete by demonstrating their skills in troubleshooting and conducting repairs, point checks, and the final inspection; and the Customer Relations section, where technicians communicate the details of the point checks to the customer in an easy-to-understand manner. Winners in the sportbike class have hailed from Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and other countries, while the commuter class has seen winners from countries like Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

“These national champions rightfully won their tickets to the WTGP, yet were unable to compete against their colleagues from around the world,” says Tanaka. “So we invited them to Japan in October this year to properly congratulate them on their achievement at an awards ceremony.”

With the WTGP scheduled to be restarted in 2025, the national championships will set the stage for the road to the finals.