“I love the pressure. It’s something that gives me more motivation, more flow on track… when I was fighting for the Moto3 title, with all the pressure in Valencia, I had a really good performance, also in Moto2 – it’s something that I like, to have the pressure because it activates inside of me like another setting, another thing.”
Speaking to The Race during the Algarve media day last week, Alex Marquez says something that most MotoGP riders probably believe about themselves, being quite the self-confident, mentally-attuned bunch.
And in the junior Marquez’s case it’s quite easy to poke holes in his sentiment – if he loves pressure, why does he tend to fall short in qualifying and keep crashing in high-pressure situations?
But neither Marquez himself, nor yours truly – the interviewer – know at that point that on Sunday he will put his money where his mouth is. Against the backdrop of a rumour that Jack Miller is being lined up for his LCR Honda ride and his team boss’s admission that results need to be better to earn a contract extension, Marquez comes up with one of the best races of his MotoGP career so far, coming within 0.020s of beating his brother Marc to finish as top Honda.
Does it mean he’s safe and secure for 2023? Unlikely. If he reverts to his past form, it’s quite plausible that a rollercoaster career in the grand prix paddock could wither and die out. This would be a big shame – for all the suspicions of it being nepotism that got him this far, this has been a unique career, with a unique and deeply interesting rider at the centre of it.
Did you know, for instance, that Marquez is one of just two current MotoGP riders – along with his elder brother – to have been champion in both the lightweight class and intermediate class? It’s a very serious accomplishment! And yet Alex was never quite the can’t-miss, no-doubt prospect Marc was, not aided by having spent five seasons in Moto2 – all five with a team as big as Marc VDS, which is not something most riders can afford.
“In 2015 and ’16 I had a lot of doubts,” he recalls of his first Moto2 seasons.
“In that moment I was not thinking of MotoGP because in Moto2 I was really slow. Just in that moment, I was thinking ‘OK, I’m good enough to be here, no? yes?’.
“People were speaking on this, so it was difficult in that point, it was the toughest point that I have in my career, in that one.”
“More than now?” I ask.
“Yeah, more than now. Much more than now. Because even in practice I wasn’t fast – it was like always in 15th place, 20th, 25th. It was really difficult to understand.”
Marquez climbed out of that particular hole, and would subsequently attract reported MotoGP interest from the likes of Petronas Yamaha and Pramac Ducati. By the time a factory Honda seat opened up for 2020, with Jorge Lorenzo suddenly retiring, Alex was one of the principal names on the cusp of the premier class.
“I remember in 2019 when I took the decision to go to Honda, everybody said to me ‘you’re crazy’, but I said ‘it’s my opportunity’ and it’s something I felt that I need to take.
“[Dani] Pedrosa had two difficult last years in Honda, also Lorenzo [pictured above], and all this – I think for that reason people said to me ‘ah, you’re a little bit crazy, don’t do that’, but when HRC came to me and said to me ‘we believe in you, we want to give you this opportunity’, I said yes, without any doubt.”
Marquez is the most recent rider to step into the premier class on a Honda, so it is tempting to wonder how it would’ve played out for him had he learned his ropes on a bike less aggressive than the RC213V, long stereotyped as quite unfriendly to ride.
Alex, for his part, is clear he would make the same decisions all over again – even knowing how it played out. Before the COVID-delayed 2020 season started, he and everyone else had already learned he would be making way for Pol Espargaro in the factory line-up the following year, instead moving to LCR.
“In that point, if I need to be honest, yeah, it hurt a little bit to me because I didn’t have the opportunity to show if I was great enough for that situation or not.
“But I mean, later on, thinking at home, relaxed, I said ‘OK, but they are giving to me two years more of opportunity, without seeing me in a MotoGP race’. So, I said ‘OK, I’m thankful for that, I will try to show my potential.”
Marquez describes his first Honda season as “really good” but there’s a chance he’s only remembering the best parts – he was great at staying on the bike, but the qualifying struggles bit hard throughout. It wasn’t the kind of year that would make Honda want to incinerate Espargaro’s contract or anything, yet it did yield two podiums, and Marquez was shockingly fast during the Aragon double-header.
In some way, LCR always made more sense as an initial destination for Alex than the factory team – even brother Marc seemed to be in agreement publicly. The man himself, though, appears in two minds.
“It was a really difficult situation for me to be alone on a big box, big garage like the Repsol Honda team, but I learned a lot in that point.
“It’s true that [as a satellite rider] you need to try less things but when you are in trouble, you receive the [new] things a little bit later. In some points it’s better, in some points it’s worse because you know that the official team has already those things that are working better, but you will receive in two races or one race.
“It’s [also] true that [as a satellite rider] you can work a little bit more in a calm way, but the pressure also I like, it’s something that I say to the LCR team, to all my team – OK, ‘we are here but I want the pressure like we’re in the factory team’.
“In LCR I feel really really good. With Lucio [Cecchinello, team boss] I have a really good and great relationship, and I believe in this team and I believe that we can turn around this situation.”
Things have not clicked yet for any sustained period of time at LCR. Marquez has not progressed much in pace relative to 2020, and he has been crashing more – much, much more, bringing back the memories of an accident-prone Moto2 rider that had been largely banished with his measured rookie season.
Throughout all of it, though, the 26-year-old remained his consistent self – no obvious outbursts, no visible dejection, never a curt one-word answer to the press yet giving off an unmistakable introverted vibe.
It may strike you as armchair psychoanalysis – and it might very well be – but Marquez does seem to agree with that assessment.
“Yeah, not just here, also in my personal side, I’m a guy who keeps things for myself.
“I’m a guy that, OK, [if] I’m sad, I need to arrive and speak with the team, I’ll say ‘OK, this and this’ but later on, with my people, in front of the camera I like to be optimistic, not to say ‘no, everything is bad, bike is a disaster, I’m not performing like I want’ – I want always to take the good things from the bad things.
“My personality is a little bit like this, like you said, introvertido in Spanish.”
In his media approach, like in so many other things, it is impossible not to compare him with Marc, who is unmistakably similar. Both face the press with a smile more often than not, both have strong opinions they are happy to share, and both sometimes come across as politicians in riders’ clothes.
But Alex is probably more introverted than Marc, and he believes he is sometimes too closed off – not so much to the media but to his team – for his own good. He feels he sometimes needs to let his emotions “explode” rather than take them with him on track.
“It’s something that I really need to improve, I need to be a little bit more open and speak more about my problems with my team.
“It’s something that I started for example in Austin, because I really needed it there because I remember I had a big meeting with Lucio, it was Saturday morning because I was lost – and I said ‘OK, Lucio, I need to speak with you, I’m completely lost, I need your help’. I don’t really like to say it to my boss. But at that point I needed it.”
Was that Cecchinello chat integral to what then happened at Portimao? Maybe. But there’s scope for big changes within the Honda camp as a whole right now, thanks to the heavily revised RC213V.
“I think we passed from one extreme to the other one,” Marquez says, elaborating again on Honda’s transition from a bike that “had a really critical but really good front and no rear grip” to “completely the opposite way – no feelings on the front, problems to turn the bike, but a lot of rear grip – too much, I would say”.
The Honda camp was enamoured with the new bike in the pre-season but Marquez acknowledges the test grip helped “cover many of the problems”. And yet he hasn’t exactly changed his tune – there’s an unmistakable belief that with this new package a major improvement is right over the horizon, just waiting to be unlocked with some new chassis developments that are trickling in.
And once he has the package he needs, he believes he can be not just an effective Sunday operator but a much-improved qualifier, even despite the acknowledged complications of a growing fleet of Ducatis and a growing Aprilia threat.
Marquez has always been an optimist. What can he tell fans and media – I ask, perhaps somewhat bluntly – to get them to share his optimism?
“I mean, I don’t really like to speak too much out of [off-]track, I prefer to speak inside [on] the track. Because you can say many many things but if you have not a great performance inside [on-track], it’s for nothing. I prefer to be calm, just to work – I know that I’m a two-time world champion and I believe in the work that I do, I know that physically I’m in the [right] form, mentally also, it’s just a matter of time to be back [up] there.
“We just need to wait a little bit, to have patience. But it’s not easy to have patience here because the races are passing and everybody, I’m the first one that I want to have a great performance, a great potential, from right now.”
Algarve will have bought him some time but the MotoGP rider market is not known for patience. Any more stagnation and Marquez is bound to find himself fighting a losing battle.
If he leaves at the end of the year, his legacy in the paddock will be a fascinating one. He’d walk as at least a two-time MotoGP podium finisher and a champion in two grand prix classes.
Those two titles, he says, he would not trade for just being a MotoGP frontrunner – only for a MotoGP crown. “But if not, I would not change. Because it’s something that I have in my pocket already and it’s something that I will never forget.”
There’s more room in that pocket. And it’s hard not to want to the Spaniard fill it up some more.
