Everyone has their breaking point. And everyone reacts in a different way when frustrations boil over, generally doing so in a way that is out of character. This is very much what we are seeing unfold in front of us with Marc Marquez.
It’s no secret he is losing patience with Honda. Having gone through the injury hell of his badly broken right arm in 2020 and put himself through more misery with four operations to try and get back to a competitive level, Honda hasn’t been delivering him the tools he needs.
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Honda has built some bad bikes in recent years, but the current one and last year’s model are perhaps the worst of the bunch. Even through 2019 and with the 2020/2021 bike, Marquez was still competitive on them. He dominated the 2019 campaign with top two finishes in all but one of the 19 grands prix, and eased to a sixth premier class crown by 151 points, as no other HRC rider got near a podium.
Prior to his season-ending crash at Jerez, Marquez was on course to win that Spanish Grand Prix in 2020, having been left fighting from the back by an early off. And he admitted in the winter of 2022 that, had he been fit, he would have probably won the 2021 title: after all, he still scored three victories with essentially only one functioning arm.
Honda’s radical concept change for 2022 is where the problems it faces now can be traced to. With Marquez out of action for several months at the end of 2021 due to a vision problem after a training crash, development of the 2022 bike was done without his input. When he returned in pre-season testing of that year, the bike started to bite him as the shift in balance to try and find more rear grip meant he couldn’t utilise his key strength of corner-entry.
His first proper taste of the 2023 bike in Valencia (he tried a prototype at Misano in September, but had just come back from three months on the sidelines after his fourth operation) wasn’t met positively, as he said it already wasn’t good enough to fight for the title. It never really improved from there.
So far, Marquez has crashed out of all three grands prix he has started in 2023 – the first one leading to a three-round spell out with injury – and has scored just 15 points. All of those crashes have been on the front-end.
Source: Autosport