Much digital ink has been spilt over Honda’s poor MotoGP off-season, but 2023 was still – and is still – supposed to mark a new beginning, if not a swift return to frontrunning contention than at the very least the start of a proper rebuild to get there sooner than later.
The developments haven’t brought a step forward, but there were things that should have a longer-term influence – a newfound urgency from the factory in Japan, as repeatedly emphasised by Marc Marquez; a big new technical hire in ex-Suzuki man Ken Kawauchi; and, most obviously, a clear on-paper upgrade to the rider line-up, with Honda swooping in to get established stars Alex Rins and Joan Mir from the rubble of Suzuki’s programme.
But with Marquez’s Portimao error setting up the latest race weekend of many in the last few years that he’s been sidelined for, Argentina 2023 felt eerily like a new-cast remake of most Marc-less weekends from 2022. Almost ‘new-cast’, anyway. Takaaki Nakagami is still here, recast in his role, like when Sean Connery played James Bond in two different film adaptations of the same Ian Fleming book (the movies in question being 1965’s Thunderball and 1983’s Never Say Never Again, if you’re inclined to go down that particular rabbit hole).
LCR Honda picked up a fairly paltry 10 points from the Argentina weekend. The Repsol-backed factory team came away with nothing, and there are fitness question marks over both its riders for COTA.
The haul should’ve been bigger, yes. Rins ran as high as fifth in the wet race and attributed his eventual drop-off to ninth not to any bike performance – going as far as to suggest the RC213V was an upgrade on the Suzuki GSX-RR in the wet – but to a visibility issue.
“I don’t know if it was 15 laps to the end or 12 laps – I started to have some problems with the visor, with the fog inside. And I couldn’t see anything,” he said, explaining also that the issue hadn’t come up in previous wet-weather running.
“When I started to lose positions, it’s because of this. Because I couldn’t see the lines, see the kerbs. It was a disaster. But before that, I was riding quite well, it was amazing, the feeling with the bike was super, the grip with the maximum angle, compared to the previous bike I was riding this one has a lot of traction on the wet. I was able to stop well the bike.
“So it was a shame, a real shame. Podium I don’t know, but to finish top five-six I was able.”
Team-mate Nakagami, finishing 13th, had a visibility drama of his own, with his bike’s windscreen fogging up so much as to be “completely white”, forcing him to spend large portions of the race leaning out. But he was also clearly not as fast as Rins, lamenting an overly restrictive electronics set-up.
But that was in the wet. The more relevant going forward will have been the dry-weather sprint race, and that was pretty dire indeed.
Firstly and most importantly, it took Mir out of the equation with injury.
Honda’s weekend
Friday practice
Nakagami, P8, +0.553s
Rins, P10, +0.599s
Mir, P13, +0.719s
Saturday qualifying
Nakagami, P11, +4.328s
Rins, P12, +4.813s
Mir, P19, +1.200s to escape Q1
Saturday sprint
Nakagami, P11, +0.465s per lap
Rins, P15, +0.724s per lap
Mir, DNF
Sunday race
Rins, P9, +0.573s per lap
Nakagami, P13, +1.136s per lap
The 2020 world champion, having shown impressive pace on his Honda debut at Portimao but with only subpar results to show for it, was all at sea and “worried a lot” for most of Friday practice. He had started with a qualifying-oriented set-up from Portimao and was floundering, but an eventual settings change offered some light at the end of the tunnel, even if he couldn’t quite follow the LCR duo in making Q2 through practice results.
Then, on a wet track in Q1, he was completely nowhere, placing him last on the grid.
And having recovered two places during the opening lap of the sprint, he then went down in apparent contact with Gresini Ducati’s Fabio Di Giannantonio – contact which remains hard to fully understand from the available footage but for which Mir appeared completely blameless – and got injured, the latest diagnosis being “cervical physiological lordosis” (a hopefully mild spinal curve injury) amid continuing “nausea and dizziness”.
But that kind of thing happens, and is not something that necessarily reflects poorly on the RC213V. What reflects poorly is that Nakagami and Rins were massively slow in Q2 on a drying track – to the point where, had they not made Q2 through Friday, you’d imagine they’d be joining Mir on the last row – and then made nothing of the sprint.
“Honestly, the performance, we struggled,” said Nakagami, who did finish the sprint a respectable 11th – a position that admittedly still needs to be taken in the context of four full-time riders sitting out Termas.
“Quite a big gap. We definitely lacked grip, but mainly traction area. We are losing a lot. The bike doesn’t- we have power, but somehow we couldn’t use that to get the drive [on corner exit].
“All the [other] manufacturers, they are somehow able to use it. And the gap is quite big.
“I was struggling inside the group. Good potential on the braking, but I had no chance to overtake because before braking I had a big gap. Like this, for me it’s frustrating. I couldn’t have a strategy like this.”
Rins – having an updated chassis at his disposal in the weekend as a hand-me-down from the absent Marquez’s garage – had a worse time still en route to 15th.
“On qualy time, all three riders from Honda, we felt exactly the same, a bit of problems on the electronics side. Then in the race, I struggled a lot.
“It’s so hard to stop the bike. I’m not finding the way right now.
“I was super-surprised with the result. I didn’t expect. The pace yesterday was not so bad. Morning rain put some dust on the track and the grip was not the same – but, you know, it’s strange.”
For Rins, it was a lot like Portimao. For Nakagami, “definitely much better than Portimao”, though this was pretty clearly more reflective of a personal improvement than anything to do with the package.
Still, for a track where better things were expected from Honda by many, where it was a routinely credible force between 2014 and 2019 not just through Marquez’s low-grip virtuosity but the efforts of Dani Pedrosa and Cal Crutchlow, it was pretty hard to accept.
Honda’s season could now be in a holding pattern, awaiting the arrival of the Kalex chassis that Marquez claimed he knew nothing about but nobody is really denying. And, even outside of that consideration, it’s easy to have sympathy – the bike hasn’t evolved enough, and the new weekend format doesn’t leave a ton of room for experimentation.
But Termas 2023 looked way, way too much like the write-off Marquez-less weekends of the recent past, and one-man reliance simply cannot continue.
