Marc Marquez believe Honda’s entire MotoGP structure is still paying the price for its disastrous 2020 season.
As it went without a premier class win for the first time in 30 years, Honda essentially ended up with its on-track leadership structure gutted thanks to injuries suffered by both Marquez (keeping him out of the entire season) and satellite rider Cal Crutchlow (who spent much of the year far from at full fitness).
That left it relying on Marquez’s younger brother Alex, who’d joined the Repsol team as a rookie as a replacement for Jorge Lorenzo following his mid-contract retirement, and with second satellite rider Taka Nakagami on a 2019 bike, meaning the team’s development stagnated – and the elder Marquez says the poor start to 2021 is the price for that.
“In the end Honda is working a lot,” he said when asked by The Race about Honda’s plight ahead of this weekend’s French Grand Prix, “and they’ve brought a lot of new items and we’re trying many different things.
“But everything becomes more difficult when you don’t have a very fast rider. When you have a rider at the front riding every session at the top, then everything is easier for the engineers.
“But we are coming from a very difficult 2020 season where they had a rookie in the garage, where Crutchlow wasn’t at his best level and was struggling a lot, and where Nakagami was on a different bike.
“All these things didn’t help, but now it looks like everything is going in a different way. We need time.”
Honda is getting there gradually, but it’s an all-hands-on-deck process according to Marquez’s younger brother, who admitted that his own testing plan last week was torn up as HRC works hard to make the RC213V better.
Getting the chance to complete a one-day test at Jerez following the Spanish Grand Prix there two weeks ago, the LCR Honda rider was hoping to try to find a cure to his own issues with front tyre confidence – but instead got drafted into working for the factory effort.
“The plan in the afternoon was to try some things to improve the front feeling that we were missing a little bit during all the weekend,” Alex explained, “especially in the fast corners. Unfortunately we tried some things from Honda and we weren’t able to try and find the feeling. It’s good that we’re trying things for the future, but we didn’t improve the feeling.
“It’s true that we need to improve a lot of things, and all the factories including Honda can improve things like the organisation. It’s true, but it’s normal. Every day and every year you have to improve not only the bike but the organisation, and they are putting all their effort in.
“Still I think we need to work hard because it’s not the best scenario for Honda, but they are working hard to make the best effort and the progress that the riders want. They want even more than us to see the bike winning again.”
His replacement at the factory team, Pol Espargaro, still sounds like a frustrated man despite also getting the chance to work on new things of his own in his first mid-season test as a Honda rider after making the switch from KTM at the start of the season.
Complaining bitterly during the race weekend at Jerez at what he seemingly perceived as a disorganised development strategy at Honda – something far removed from the unified approach he was used to at KTM – Espargaro conceded that much of the test was spent working on his own rather than as part of the team.
“I’m working in the way that we left Jerez,” he said of the test. “I tried many things in the test, played with a thousand things – ergonomics, aerodynamics, electronics. Different things to make me a little faster whatever the others are using.
“It was a useful day, and I took some things that I think will be useful in Le Mans, but in the end we need to look at ourselves, try to be better and use what we have in our garage. It’s the only thing we can do, and it’s what we’re going to do.”
