When MotoGP bursts into life at Texas’ Circuit of the Americas this weekend for the first time in almost two years, all eyes will of course be on one person: Marc Marquez, six time champion and star of the American Grand Prix since the series first headed to Austin in 2013.
Winning his first ever premier class race there in only his second ever outing in MotoGP, it heralded what was to come both in his rookie season and at COTA. Setting himself up for a further five wins and a title in 2013, that first victory was a sign of things to come.
In the six outings at the track (with 2020 of course being cancelled thanks to COVID-19), he’s easily won five of them.
The only defeat, on the last visit there in 2019, didn’t come at the hands of anyone else but himself. Running clear at the front of the field and very much looking on track for win number seven, it was only a moment of inattention – the kind that you can only have when you’ve got something left in the bag – that took him down and left the road clear for Alex Rins to mug Valentino Rossi in the final laps and win his first ever MotoGP race.
His previous Texas form is also a mark of Marquez’s special relationship with the rarer anti-clockwise circuits on the MotoGP calendar though. Places like the Sachsenring and Aragon quickly joined the Circuit of the Americas in becoming the tracks where he would become most dominant.
Coming in large part thanks to his flat-track training, where riders only turn left and where throttle control on long, fast and sometimes slippery corners is essential, it’s clear in the stats that there’s something special between him and counterclockwise tracks.
Averaging a win rate of about 40% of all the MotoGP races he’s started in his career, that number jumps to 70% at left-handed tracks – and stands at a whopping 87% when you look at Aragon, Austin, Indianapolis and the Sachsenring, his most favoured venues.
So going simply on statistics, he has to go into this weekend’s Grand Prix of the Americas as the clear favourite, right?
That would be the case if we were looking at the Marc Marquez of 2019, but unfortunately that particular racer doesn’t exist right now – and potentially might never again emerge, as he continues to deal with the aftermath of his crash at Jerez last July and the subsequent damage done by his botched attempt to return to racing only five days later.
The humerus bone damaged in the crash is now fully healed and back to strength, and any lingering issues around nerve damage appears to have been repaired, at least enough for him to be able to ride a MotoGP bike to his limits when the occasion calls for it.
But the problem is no longer his arm, it’s the shoulder joint connected to it. No stranger even before his Jerez crash to joint problems, having needed operations on both shoulders in the preceding winters just to stop them from dislocating every time he received a particularly violent hug from Scott Redding, the right joint has suffered both from the extra stresses put on it by his recovery and by the inherent weakness in the arm from months of limited use.
As a result, Marquez has admitted freely that he’s not able to ride the Honda RC213V the way he used to. He can’t utilise the fine control he needs to make his incredible saves and he can’t rely on his body to allow him to push beyond the limit of a really rather average machine.
That was something that he was able to manage at the Sachsenring back in June, to take his first and to date only victory since the crash. Tackling not a long, flowing and physically heavy duty circuit but instead a short, twisty ribbon of German asphalt that curls around itself, a win was manageable.
He won’t have the same benefit at Austin, though. A hard track on a rider’s body and with long straights, fast slalom sections and one of the hardest-braking corners of the entire MotoGP calendar, it’s difficult to see that he’ll be able to perform similar heroics to Germany there.
“I am looking forward to Austin,” he said in the team’s pre-event press release, “and we’re arriving there after two good races, in Aragon and then in Misano. It’s a layout that I like and in the past we have had a lot of success but this year is a little bit different with our situation arriving there.
“Like always, it’s going to be important to build over the weekend and see where we line up on Sunday morning. No matter what it will be great to return because it’s a round I always enjoy a lot.”
While Marquez assures us in those comments that he is keen to return and take on the challenge of Austin, reading between the lines, there’s just a hint of doubt over his “situation arriving there”.
Marquez’s form will no doubt be one of the stories of the weekend as Austin gets a welcome return to the series.
