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Sachsenring MotoGP winner Marc Marquez has revealed that a 30-minute phone call with fellow Honda legend Mick Doohan was instrumental in keeping his spirits up amid the difficult start to his premier-class comeback.
Marquez sat out 15 MotoGP races after breaking his right humerus bone in a crash in the 2020 MotoGP opener at Jerez and then exacerbating his injury by trying to return to riding the next week.
Not only did it virtually rule him out of two successive MotoGP title fights – after he’d won six titles in the past seven years – but bigger repercussions were feared, especially when an infection in the arm was discovered in the off-season.
Since returning to the grid at Portimao in mid-April, Marquez has struggled to recapture his past form, and crashed out of three successive races in the lead-up to the Sachsenring. But he thrived at the German track he’d made his own in the past, and took a long-awaited first victory since 2019.
“When you’re in a difficult situation, you try to find help, from somewhere,” Marquez told MotoGP.com’s After The Flag show following the win. “Alberto Puig [Honda MotoGP boss] helped me a lot, all my team helped me a lot, all my family, my manager.
“But the person that was in a similar situation was Mick Doohan. In Mugello I spoke a little bit with him, after the race I say ‘I want to have a phone call with you’.
“We had a phone call, it was 30 minutes, just he was speaking and I was listening.”
“He was saying exactly the same problems, same feeling that I have now: ‘difficult to understand the bike, difficult to understand the riding style, stupid mistakes, stupid crashes'” :: Marc Marquez
Doohan had been dominating the 1992 500cc title race and cruising to what should’ve been his first premier-class crown when he broke his right tibia in a Dutch TT qualifying crash.
He underwent surgery the same day, but complications nearly led to his leg being amputated and a difficult recovery followed – with Doohan returning to competition late in the season but being unable to stop a fitter Wayne Rainey from snatching the title.
Doohan then finished only fourth the following year, but then went on a five-year streak of 500cc titles from 1995 on.
Marquez said the phone call with Doohan “helped me a lot to keep pushing”.
“My question was ‘what was your feeling and your problems, ’92-93?’ and he explained everything,” Marquez said.
“It was like he was saying the same problems, exactly the same problems, same feeling that I have now: ‘difficult to understand the bike, difficult to understand the riding style, stupid mistakes, stupid crashes’, all these things are what I’m doing. [laughs]
“He said ‘in some races you will be fast, some races very slow’.
“When somebody, a legend like Mick, that was an animal on the bike, he suffered but he came back in the future, this gives you good confidence to keep working.”
