If Maverick Vinales was the most obviously frustrated and glum MotoGP rider in the aftermath of the German Grand Prix at the Sachsenring, Pol Espargaro was a not too distant runner-up.
“I felt a very bad Sunday. Honestly, I cannot catch anything positive from it,” he said.
“I did a bad race, I’m not happy with the result, I’m not happy with the pace. The feelings were not good, I was struggling quite a lot, and it’s the first time in a race with the Honda I couldn’t be close to what I did in the practice.
“The start was a mess and after it, I couldn’t overtake, or I was overtaking but going wide. So, everything from the beginning to the end, it was not good at all, I’m super disappointed.”
Espargaro’s dream move to Repsol Honda continues to not deliver the results either side was hoping for.
Despite a promising pre-season, the newcomer was unable to strike while Marc Marquez was still sidelined, and it’s taken Marquez very little time to start getting a lot more out of the (clearly flawed) RC213V than Espargaro.
In the meantime, Espargaro – a beaming presence for so much of his KTM tenure, not just due to pride in his performances but pride in the project overall – has got gloomier and gloomier.
The German GP was hardly the nadir of his season so far. You’ll note that he finished 10th, nine places up on the aforementioned Vinales, and as the second-best Honda, having also qualified as the second-best Honda.
But the crashes in FP1, FP2 and FP3 had done extra damage to Espargaro’s confidence, and there was little joy to be found in being thoroughly outclassed by his team-mate, even when that team-mate is an all-time premier-class great.
“Today was the first time I took so much time to my team-mate,” Espargaro said. “I think never in my life I took 14 seconds to my team-mate, and it opened my eyes.”
He’s not quite right there – there have been three times in his MotoGP career so far that Espargaro trailed a team-mate by more than the 14.769s he trailed Marquez by here. All three occasions were versus long-time Tech3 Yamaha and KTM squadmate Bradley Smith, the most recent coming in 2018 in Thailand – where Espargaro was riding injured and ran out of stamina.
What is clear is that it’s not normal, especially for the marque-leading rider that Espargaro proved he could be in his time at KTM. And across his whole MotoGP career, the average gap at the finish to Espargaro’s regular-season team-mate is 5.1s in Espargaro’s favour.
So, like Vinales, Espargaro was “super pissed off” getting stuck in traffic at the Sachsenring. Like Vinales, he will have been stung by seeing his team-mate so far ahead.
But unlike Vinales, who has made it clear he does not feel he should be expected to use Yamaha standout Fabio Quartararo’s set-up, Espargaro sees mimicry as the obvious way to go about lowering the gap to Marquez.
“From now on I think I’m going to just try to copy Marquez’s setting, Marquez’s chassis, because he’s using a different [one] than us,” Espargaro said. “And I’m going to copy his line.
“Till that moment [at the Sachsenring], we were not very far away on rhythm, on laptime, but this race, it’s a step. And for sure I’m very happy for the team and for the guys that have been working so much, even for Marc, but the point is that for sure Marc showed the performance today of the bike and I need to be on the level.
“The only way I see is to copy his setting, his bike, his chassis as soon as possible, and then go in his line.
“And from what moment on, there’s no excuses. I need to do what he does, otherwise I’m too slow for that bike, that’s it.”
The mention of ‘chassis’ suggests this isn’t quite the mea culpa it might come off as at first glance. When asked to clarify whether the two works Honda riders were using the same chassis, Espargaro said: “No”. And his rhetoric fits in nicely with his earlier proclamation that there was a lack of unity within the Honda camp in terms of the riders’ development work and the packages they are using.
“It’s not that Marc is winning because of the bike,” Espargaro stressed, “but I’m saying that to understand that I need to do what he’s doing, I need to use exactly the same bike.
“Like that I’m going to understand exactly what he’s doing and how I need to ride this bike, on the 100% level, as he does.”
You don’t need to read too hard into the above to see it as a demand for, if not equal treatment (because there’s no allegation from Espargaro that it hasn’t been equal), then certainly more cooperation.
Yet there’s also a level of humility that we can, and should, take at face value: “Otherwise I’m too slow for that bike, and that’s it”.
Remember that this is the same rider who back in the KTM days openly and happily speculated about impending signing Johann Zarco doing more with the bike than Espargaro himself could – only for Zarco to arrive and be roundly defeated by Espargaro.
None of that is to say that Espargaro’s reaction somehow proves Vinales wrong. There is a big difference between the context surrounding the two situations, even if the situations themselves are similar.
At Yamaha, Vinales has long waited to be ‘the senior partner’, to step out of Rossi’s shadow as the marque’s undisputed leader, only for Quartararo – a younger rider who wasn’t even on the radar at the time Vinales began his Yamaha tenure – to completely obliterate that fantasy in the span of a year and a half.
Espargaro, meanwhile, is paired up with a living legend, to whom it is so much easier to show deference. And this is why Honda’s dynamic seems a lot more sustainable than Yamaha’s.
But it will buckle and fall apart too if improvements do not come. Honda hasn’t signed Espargaro to eclipse Marquez – but it hasn’t signed him to only be a minor improvement on a perennially-injured Jorge Lorenzo and a rookie Alex Marquez either.
