until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
Logic dictates that a rider switching from one bike to another is likely to get quicker and quicker over the course of his first season with the new machinery, by virtue of experience.
Logic also dictates that such a rider should get faster over the course of your average weekend, given they start with no knowledge base of how the bike behaves at the circuit and have to build it up from Friday to Sunday.
In Pol Espargaro’s case, neither of those two suppositions have materialised. A polesitter and podium finisher (and damn near a title contender) on the KTM last year, he’s yet to finish higher than eighth on the Honda RC213V in nine attempts.
“It’s bad. It’s bad. It’s worse than I wanted,” Espargaro told MotoGP.com heading into the summer break. “I didn’t expect anything [for it to be] better or worse [than my expectations] because expectations are never as you want – but surely it’s bad.
“Even if I’m 10 points behind Marc [Marquez] in the championship, same points as Taka [Nakagami], I’m not happy, still the results are not coming as I would like.
“I’m struggling more than I would like. And sure we need to turn in the second half of the season, hopefully, Honda works hard and brings us something to improve our feelings, but what is true is that we need to turn the situation after the summer break.”
The 41 points is a paltry return, although it’s generally in line with what the other factory Honda riders managed next to Marc Marquez in recent campaigns.
At the same nine-race mark in 2018, the on-his-way-out Dani Pedrosa had 49 points; likewise in 2019, Jorge Lorenzo had accrued only 19 points (he did miss two races through injury, and Espargaro’s immediate predecessor Alex Marquez managed 47 points through nine races.
Each of these was out at the season’s end. Espargaro, equipped with a two-year deal, won’t be, but also won’t get an abundance of time to turn this around. After all, some 2023-24 contracts have already been hashed out, and more are sure to follow in the off-season if not earlier.
Of course, it didn’t look like Espargaro was going to be under pressure so soon. Over the five (well, four, really) days of pre-season testing in Qatar the move looked like a masterstroke – he was quite fast right away at a track that just doesn’t lend itself all that well to the Honda.
But the pace at Losail didn’t carry over into any headline results in the Qatar double-header, and Espargaro has since repeatedly insisted he hadn’t had much of a pre-season.
Admittedly, even at a single, specific track, four full days of running isn’t nothing, but it’s a marked reduction, especially given Espargaro (assuming KTM released him) and others were denied the chance to try out their new bikes at the end of 2020 when post-season testing was binned off.
“For sure it’s missing that [a traditional off-season], missing making mistakes on the test and not during the race weekend,” he said. “I do a lot of mistakes during the weekend and I think this is due to the weakness of knowledge, that’s it.
“It’s a matter to understand the problems, once you make one mistake you don’t repeat it, but you need to make the mistake [first].”
It’s that “weakness of knowledge” that Espargaro views as an explanation for one particular, seemingly contradictory, trend that has defined his largely fruitless run-up to the summer break.
Indeed, there have been glimpses – “sparks”, as the man himself puts it – of that KTM-spec Espargaro at various points in weekends, most notably at Le Mans and at Assen. But – somewhat analogously to KTM, where he couldn’t add to its three 2020 wins despite being clearly its benchmark rider – when it came down to the so-called ‘clutch time’, he has been found wanting, seemingly gaining less than others from extra track time.
Espargaro’s season average position at the end of Friday practice is 9.8, which in qualifying then turns into 11.7. The average gap to the front, with one particularly obvious outlier removed, is 0.639s after Friday practice and 0.894s in qualifying.
But the trend has been particularly pronounced in the five weekends starting with Le Mans, where he briefly looked very strong but ultimately fizzled out. He averaged 7.0 in Friday practice and 10.2 in qualifying, with respective Friday and Saturday gaps of 0.440s and 0.799s, again counted without the big outlier – with the crash in Barcelona preventing him from setting a representative time in Q2.
Similarly, there have been FP4 race pace simulations where Espargaro has looked very capable, only for that pace to wither away come race day.
When The Race asked Espargaro about these trends after Assen qualifying, he said: “What happens is that [when] everyone knows so good their bike, this is what happens. When everyone pushes, it’s the moment where you need to get the maximum of your bike and not make mistakes.
“With no [proper] pre-season, just racing on the race weekends, when I need to push for one fast lap, I crash or I go wide. It’s this weakness of knowledge, as it happened in this qualifying, when I wanted to attack I did a mistake with the [choice of the] front tyre, thinking that it would be good but actually it’s not good. And this is knowledge for the future.”
The Honda, described by Espargaro as “not easy at all”, is obviously not the most conducive to learning. Yes, the RC213V is once again a winner in Marc Marquez’s hands – dashing Espargaro’s brief suggestion that Honda could bid for concession status – but it’s also a bike that Espargaro, the Marquez brothers and Takaaki Nakagami have all taken turns repeatedly chucking into the gravel this past half-season.
One such crash led the elder Marquez to go as far as suggesting that Honda has to make the bike safer – although he was then swiftly appeased by an electronics tweak.
In any case, it’s a bike that can really bite a rider, and Espargaro’s confidence will have taken a particular knock from the three crashes in three practice sessions at the Sachsenring.
It’s also a bike that, for Espargaro, doesn’t lend itself well to recover from poor grid positions. “For me it’s difficult still to overtake, especially at the beginning of the race with a full fuel tank. I struggle to be behind the guys, if I’m alone I can make a good pace, but as soon I’m in trouble with some guys, I protect the inside line to not be overtaken, and then I start to not ride as I like, I start to make mistakes.
“This is the main thing, to start to do everything on Saturday, not on Sunday, and not wait until Sunday to do something interesting. The main job after the summer break is to perform better in Saturday qualifying.”
The Austria double-header will be a good indicator – at a track where Espargaro was a potent force on the KTM, and where the RC213V has had highlights of its own. Run up front there, and suddenly the first half of the season means little. But continue in the same vein, and it’s easy for the campaign to spiral completely.
As it stands, there’s reason to expect either outcome, but also reason to hope for a permanent breakthrough. Otherwise, the “sparks” Espargaro has shown on the Honda will only add to the disappointment.
