Things immediately proved harder than Pol Espargaro expected when he joined the Repsol Honda MotoGP team from KTM at the start of 2021.
Through the first part of last year he struggled to change how he rode the bike and attempted to fundamentally rewrite his tuning style to adapt to a machine vastly different from what he expected.
It was a tough lesson for him, too – one that brought humiliation early on in the season as it became apparent just how far he was from his adamant pre-season goal of fighting for the title.
Yet, things slowly started to look better, culminating in a second-place finish at Misano after a key mid-season test that finally allowed him to understand the way in which to work the bike.
And now, starting the 2022 season not just armed with that information but riding a vastly different Honda RC213V thanks to his feedback, it’s starting to feel as though there’s actually a chance of delivering on the failed promises of 12 months ago.
“I never thought about it like having made a bad choice,” Espargaro admitted to The Race in an exclusive interview at last month’s final pre-season test in Indonesia, “because when you make a choice you have to go with everything you have.
“If you’ve made a wrong choice, it’s not because you didn’t think about it, it’s because it can happen. In the moment I chose, I thought it was the best option for me, and I still think it was the best choice for me, for my career.
“In the moment I started the season, for sure I felt things were much harder than I expected – but I also thought that this was normal, with a new team, on a new bike. It was so different from the KTM, even if I thought it was pretty close. But through the year it improved.
“The beginning was tough, for me and for everyone. Not having Marc [Marquez] in the team was harder for me, because even if it was very hard, most of the time I was the fastest Honda. This was not normal and I was struggling because of that too. I had questions I couldn’t answer. It was a big problem.”
Those answers started to appear as the year progressed, though. Espargaro was able to look much more like the rider who fought for wins on a KTM the year previously when MotoGP headed to cooler tracks, as it quickly became apparent where the issue lay – rear grip.
Espargaro is a rider whose style very much relies on using the rear of the bike to stop and turn it, and he found a Honda that needed the exact opposite touch. When temperatures increased, he was almost completely incapable of riding the end result.
But things did come good. The team started to work in the right direction and Espargaro took the podium at Misano – his best-ever MotoGP result – and a pole position at Silverstone. And while it might only have brought some small reward in 2021, it very much laid the foundations for a better year to come.
“It’s a kind of relief,” he said of the podium, “but not so much, because already what you’ve done wrong is done wrong. It shows that when everything is on the line, I can do it. It’s the same with the pole position in Silverstone. I can do this, with this bike – but why can’t I achieve it more often? I think that more than pain relief, it was confirmation of what I needed to be fast.
“OK, so the bike works in one way, so this is what I needed to be fast. It was nice, but it didn’t come from the podium, it came from the test in Misano before the race. We were chasing things and suddenly this setting appeared which gave me a little more confidence, allowed me to ride in the way that I like.”
Armed with the experience of that crucial test – and getting to ride the first draft of the radical new 2022 bike – it’s been an upward trajectory since then. And with a better bike as a result of the trials and tribulations of last year, those might well have been worth it, such is the improvement expected this weekend when the season kicks off in Qatar.
“I really think that now the bike is more in line with other manufacturers,” said the former Yamaha and KTM rider. “In the past, the bike was working very differently with the rear grip, the rear traction, the entry configuration into the corners. Let’s say that the bike didn’t feel like it was made for those tyres. The other manufacturers, for whatever reason, could adapt very quickly to these tyres, but the old Honda was going a little bit in the other way.
“I have the feeling that this year we’ve come back. We’re in the game again this year. I have the feeling that the bike understands the tyres much more, that we understood the problems that we had through the year much better, and the new bike is based on the solutions we’ve been thinking about this past year. It works very well. What we were trying to achieve, we achieved, and what Honda wanted to bring to race weekends, they’ve done.”
But it isn’t just a faster bike – it’s a safer one too. Both Espargaro and team-mate Marc Marquez are no strangers to crashing; Espargaro seemed to be particularly injury-prone in his time at KTM. But, the new bike is much more rider-friendly and less aggressive, and Espargaro was confident that it reduces risk at a key time, as MotoGP starts it’s longest-ever championship year.
“It’s so important,” Espargaro stressed, “because the season is longer. There are a lot of races, and one mistake can make you lose a lot of points. Many races are back-to-back. So it’s important to be fast, but it’s important to be constant as well. If you want to be consistent in the results, you need a safe bike. You can’t crash twice per weekend.
“This is super important when we check for example the Ducatis. They’re not crashing twice per weekend – it’s strange to see Pecco [Bagnaia] crashing. It’s weird. We need to achieve that. We need to be fast. We know that our bike is a little more radical than the Ducati in that regard – and I like that, it’s something I need to be fast – but not as much as to be crashing twice per weekend.
“That’s not nice, not safe, and in the end when you crash your confidence goes down and you have to build it up again. When you crash you build up the confidence and then you stay at a level where you’re super fast, super quick, and then you stay there all weekend.”
All of this couldn’t have come at a better time, either, given there are rumours circulating about his future before the season’s even started. That’s something that would demotivate another rider, but it’s obvious that’s not the case with Espargaro,.
“It’s extra motivation,” he insisted, laughing off any speculation. “We must be clear – I also saw the press through the winter, and some riders saying that they were talking with Honda when it wasn’t true.
“But this is the contract game – it’s already on in the winter before the start of the season. It’s a game that I’m used to – I’ve been in MotoGP for fifteen years and I’m used to hearing that my bike is going to be taken by another rider.
“You can take this as pressure, and feel like you’re weak, or it can make you stronger, put some fire in your ass and make you prove that you’re able to be faster than people expect. This is my situation right now. People think the bike is great, but still we need to improve quite a lot. My experience with the Honda is greater, I know the electronics guys, the technicians, and all this will help me to be faster at the start.”
That he’s taking such speculation as a confidence-builder rather than the opposite is fairly standard-issue Espargaro, of course. It’s a trait shared by both him and brother Aleix – and that underdog fighting spirit played a part in him joining Honda against a Marc Marquez in his prime in the first place.
“It was one of the reasons why I moved to Repsol Honda,” he said, when asked by about the pressure of becoming team-mate to the rider who at the time was the most dominant champion of the modern era.
“I’ve grown up racing against Marc, in all my career, fighting with him in different categories. This is something I wanted to do again, and it’s one of the reasons why I left KTM. I had the opportunity to jump beside Marc Marquez, the best rider in the world, and I wanted to see myself against him, close to him.
“I wanted to see what he is doing differently, why he is faster than me. These are the questions that sometimes don’t let me sleep at night, and finally I could know the answers. For me, that was a key point in my career, to try and move beside this guy and try to raise the level as much as possible.”
He got answers to those questions, too – although they might not have been the ones that he was hoping for. Getting a chance to compare himself to Marquez not just on track but behind closed doors on the laptop screen, Espargaro says what makes the eight-time world champion faster than anyone else is as much to do with psychology as physiology.
“His technique is special,” Espargaro explained. “He’s able to take the maximum from a very, very weak situation. This is what surprised me. When you think it’s impossible to do something because the bike isn’t making it, he’s there, able to find a way to make the bike work. Sure, this way is always super dangerous, or risky, but he’s able to take incredibly high risks to achieve it.
“Sometimes the other riders, me included, struggle to rise to this level of risk, maybe because you’re thinking about what might happen. It seems that he isn’t thinking about what might happen so much. This is what makes him so big, so good.
“But it’s also what is making him have these big crashes, the big injuries. It’s a balance, and I think that he plays with the balance pretty well, better than the others.”
But while taking on Marquez might be intimidating, it’s also all part of his journey of self improvement and, armed not just with that new information but also with a bike that’s very much the result of the blood, sweat and tears of 2021, the end result all boils down to one simple thing. Espargaro knows exactly what he has to aim for this coming year.
“Whatever Honda comes with, the targets are always the same,” he said. “We need to win. It doesn’t matter if the bike is ready, if it is fast or slow. We need to start with the target of winning championships and winning races, like Marc has done in the past years, even if the bike wasn’t in the top level.
“Whatever Honda comes with, we need to set for that level. It doesn’t matter how much effort it costs, we need to do that, but thankfully I think the bike is going to be there this year. We’re going to fight for it.”
