Marc Marquez has detailed what he believes he needs from Honda’s 2023 MotoGP machine, after the first day of practice for this weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix at the Sepang circuit – the traditional home of the championship’s pre-season tests and a familiar stomping ground for research and development work.
He has thrown himself very much into gathering the data required for next year’s machine since his return from the latest (and hopefully final) surgery on the right arm he broke in July 2020 and which has caused him constant issues since.
The Repsol Honda rider says that the experiences of his opening day at Sepang have clarified what he’s been requesting from the factory.
“I don’t know how,” he explained, “but one of the main things that we’re looking for, what we’re trying to understand – you always want more torque, more turning, but the way to ride the bike… I feel like it’s not handling, like the bike is heavy.
“We need to understand why we feel that inertia on the bike because that’s what I would like to improve. Like this, OK, in circuits where you don’t have a lot of changes of direction or stopping, you can manage it more or less. Like Phillip Island or Qatar.
“But as soon as you need to stop the bike a lot, on an angle, is where I personally am struggling more. The other Honda riders, I don’t know, but we need to understand these kinds of things and to improve.
“Already here this weekend we are working in a different way to understand these things. Today, I couldn’t try, but tomorrow I need to try it and if I need to sacrifice the position to do it, then I will.
“Sure, today I am P3, but it’s not the real position. We struggled a lot today and on the race pace, I was tenth, more or less. We need to understand why and keep working, keep working and keep pushing.”
And while it’s apparent just from watching him in action since the corrective operation to break and reset his right arm in the correct place rather than with a huge 34º rotation that he’s now manhandling the RC213V in a much more natural way, he’s insistent that the change is not something that has come about due to ergonomics or setting, but rather a more fundamental issue.
“My position on the bike, I feel very similar to always,” he said. “It’s more the character of the bike. As I said in the first part of the season, it’s changed a lot, and from a riding style, I believe it’s worse. But it’s true that for the overall performance, for the laptime, this 2022 bike has been better.
“For my riding style, it feels worse, I feel more uncomfortable, but the lap times are coming. For this reason, we chose to decide upon this way, but still I feel… in Phillip Island I did a good race, but the bike was shaking too much, some things that make the bike more and more difficult to ride.”
Marquez is riding a bike that’s largely the same as it started the year with despite revised aerodynamics and a new aluminium swing arm and the ditching of the carbon version he previously spent years refining.
He’s also adamant that the bike won’t be so different from the one used in pre-season test next year – and that defining it into something more competitive is still possible before the start of 2023.
“It’s more or less a similar bike, and the only change really is the aerodynamics now, and the swing arm,” Marquez explained. “The swing arm is not a big, big difference. For example in Thailand in FP1 I was first with the carbon one, so we are talking about small differences. We need to understand the way, because it’s a bike that as soon as we have low grip, my strong point, you cannot do anything with this bike.
“We need to find a bike, I always say, in a championship that can be constant in all race tracks. Like Ducati did – in the past they were very strong in some tracks and struggling in other ones. Now they are strong and constant in all tracks, and we need to find a compromise. Honda are working a lot on it.”
