If you look at Marc Marquez’s MotoGP career in five-start stretches, he’s definitely had much worse than the run he is on right now. There were, for instance, the three retirements in five races in 2015 that killed his title challenge that year, and last year he scored just 16 points in his first five starts since the fateful Jerez injury.
But Marquez’s five starts in 2022 so far are definitely his most un-Marquez run yet. From Qatar to France (skipping Indonesia and Argentina due to concussion symptoms and double vision) he’s finished every race he started between fourth and sixth.
A stretch of five starts that yielded no podiums and no DNFs is uncharted territory for Marquez, even post-injury Marquez, given he’d spent 2021 first crashing incessantly and then being a consistent podium challenger. It’s true, though, that you could maybe make the case that the absences at Mandalika and Termas were as good as DNFs because they came as a result of a heavy crash, even Marquez himself acknowledges his current run as quite foreign to him.
Asked after taking sixth place at Le Mans if in a similar position a younger, pre-injury Marquez would’ve risked more and potentially crashed, the Honda rider said: “Of course. Of course. Three years ago, it was impossible to finish – how many races did I do this this year, five? Sixth, fifth, sixth, fifth, fourth? It was impossible.
“Three to four years ago, if I was out of the top five, I crashed because I pushed.
“But now I was far, and we are too far to take that risk. Because you see that you cannot ride a bit faster to arrive [at the front]. Then in that situation it’s easier to accept.”
Marquez is not doing poorly – if anything, given the fact he clearly doesn’t have frontrunning pace more often than not, you could make the case that he’s doing incredibly well. And he could well have won at Austin, which would’ve painted a very different picture.
Yet in the races following the Circuit of the Americas weekend he has been squeezing blood from the stone, desperately tucking in between faster riders to maximise his grid position and never really threatening at the front come Sunday.
It has been an unusual sight, even compared to 2021.
“I took a risk first lap and then I said ‘OK, now it’s my position, let’s see’,” Marquez said of the Le Mans race, in which he finished sixth.
“I didn’t feel well, I saw that the possibility of a crash was very big. If I took the risk, maybe I was able to finish in front of Johann [Zarco for fifth place], maybe. But it was only one position better or worse.
“The top guys were much faster than us.”
It is clear as day that Marquez is not at his ludicrous 2019 heights in terms of performance, and he may never get there again – given that, more than a year on from his post-injury return, he’s still having to ration his energy through the weekend.
“I’m not in my sweet moment,” he said. “I was riding much better in the past. Now I’m riding in a different way, [it was] a strange way in the beginning but I got used, but it’s true that I’m not riding like I want.
“I’m always trying to force my riding style to what I need. But it’s true that I’m not riding in my best level, but every race I’m the first Honda. That means that the performance is there, but I’m not riding well.
“In practice I try to find too many riders, to find a lap, then the rhythm is difficult to get – but we are working.”
The other factor is, of course, that the all-new Honda RC213V is perceived as having moved away from his strengths. Marquez is right to point out that he’s still clearly the benchmark within the camp – this has been true for four races out of five he’s contested this year – but the margins have changed.
In his are-you-kidding-me 2019, he beat the next-best Honda by an average of 17.8 seconds across the season. Last year, it was 3.6 seconds – although without the outlier of a Red Bull Ring race in which he crashed and thus finished 40 seconds off, the margin is a more representative six seconds.
This year it’s 3.6s without much in the way of outliers. Marquez was the top Honda in each of the last three races, but in each case he’s had a fellow Honda rider close behind.
If the new RC213V evolves into the best bike on the grid, that won’t be a problem. But it’s very far from that right now, so Honda needs miracles from its star man – and, aside from his traditional strongholds like COTA and, presumably, Sachsenring, he’s just not in a position to deliver them.
