Five races have passed since Marc Marquez returned to MotoGP, ten months after the accident at the start of the late 2020 season in Jerez that first caused the arm injury that dashed his hopes for a seventh title in eight years.
At the time, the Spaniard made it clear that he was still on the last leg of a long, arduous and undoubtedly painful recovery process, but since there is no substitute for actual racing in terms of match fitness, he persevered.
He went on to finish seventh in his comeback event and ninth thereafter, results that were remarkable in the circumstances.
On the subject of matching items
But while few will say Marquez is 100 percent fit, repeated accidents – including three from the last three races – put the spotlight back on Honda, fearing that without its talisman it may have completely lost its way into development .
Marquez is certainly not the rider we saw during the 2019 MotoGP season where he was not only dominant but also had the confidence to play with his rivals and drag out the battles knowing full well that he had another 10% in hand to help them cross the line. He could have faded into the distance like Casey Stoner (not popular) or he could have had fun and do it for a show like Valentino Rossi – everyone was still psychologically demoralizing to rivals.
How far is it from the “Peak Marc Marquez”?
Nobody expected that he would be back to his best in an instant. After all, it is breathtaking to see a fully fit Marquez on a Honda tuned to his unique style, in his sheer power as he gently and aggressively moves over the RC213V.
It’s also very physical though and today Marquez certainly looks stiff trying something like this, which may be why he can’t capture the snaps and slides as quickly and effectively as he normally would. On the other hand, he is statistically one of the most productive “crashers” in MotoGP, he just didn’t do it that often on race day.
It’s worth noting that Marquez doesn’t talk as much about the arm injury that occurred in Jerez, but points out his shoulder as a problem. Many will have forgotten, but Marquez fell badly and injured his shoulder while testing in Valencia in November 2019, a year after a similar accident injured his other shoulder.
He had an operation and there were question marks as to whether he would make the 2020 season opener in Qatar three months later. That was then canceled and little has been said about the injury since then, most assuming the extended winter period was enough to heal it, even before his enforced 10 month hiatus.
During this time, however, he’s lost the strength he needs around his shoulder, the kind of strength that can only be achieved on a bike – and not in the gym – an issue that only came into focus last month after his comeback He was allowed to drive a classy motorcycle (a production Honda CBR600RR on a race track) in the interests of training.
Only Marquez will know how far he is from his peak performance and how much he may never recover, but after 87 laps in the MotoGP test to Catalonia on Monday – after consecutive race weekends – the fitness is definitely there when he is on Did not finish as many laps in the end.
Regardless, physical performance is one thing, having machines under one is another, and suspicions are growing that Marquez’s patchy form has less to do with him than with the Honda in his grip.
Has Honda really dropped the ball with the 2021 RC213V?
Simply put, yes. However, this is an issue that dates back to before the 2020 MotoGP season when Honda went so far in developing an RC213V to match Marquez that it surpassed the Spaniard’s incredible, but not impenetrable, capabilities.
It comes from Marquez’s ability to stop the bike and take it into some notable lean angles before hitching it up and heading out. Cal Crutchlow found this approach – which he said had left him with no grasp of the front end – repeatedly frustrating, but although it caught him on several occasions, he worked hard to find the balance that would allow him and others to to be fast enough when the conditions are right. Even Takaaki Nakagami on the 2019 bike, after taking the data from Marquez, found the operating window that was narrow but effective, and it turned out to be a revelation in 2020.
With a combination of a 2019 aero package on a 2020 chassis, Marquez was in the process of turning it back into a competitive motorcycle when he had his accident. It left Honda an odd 2019-2020 hybrid that it cobbled together, no Marquez, an injured Cal Crutchlow, its most competitive entry (Nakagami) on a 2019 motorcycle, a test rider now focused on development over race weekends (Stefan Bradl) and a rookie in Alex Marquez as the line-up.
Form lightning aside, it was a pretty desperate 2020 season that revealed the dreaded strategy of laying the eggs in a marquez-shaped basket. Ironically, Honda had realized this before Marquez’s accident by signing Pol Espargaro for 2021, but fate has a dark sense of humor.
Perhaps most alarming about Honda’s problems is how dependent it had become on Marquez’s input that not only had it invested resources in developing an ultrafast motorcycle for an ultrafast rider, but apparently the thought processes as well. So much so that without him, Honda seemed to have no idea what to do without him.
It’s a chain of events that has evolved into today’s situation – a 2021 motorcycle (largely the same as 2020 according to the technical freeze) that has been hacked and altered so badly that, as Espargaro revealed, Honda had four riders on it three different sat specification bikes in Jerez. Honda is trying to toss it all at this unloved RC213V in hopes of something stuck, but Espargaro wants it to find a way and push everyone in the same direction.
The Honda MotoGP puzzle
What puzzles Honda (and its drivers). Should it default to listening to Marquez because past success came from there?
This is risky as he does not have full power, which could result in Honda redeveloping the RC213V mostly to his liking without fully knowing if he will ever revert to the physical style that worked so well for him but not for others. In short, it could develop a bike that won’t fit anyone, but then it already seems to be the case.
With this in mind, Espargaro should be Honda’s capital. The Spaniard is credited with doing much of the legwork that led to the explosion in KTM’s competitiveness over the past year. Indeed, one cannot help but feel for him that he has chosen the Honda route, especially since he kicked himself out of his native Catalonia MotoGP in a race that his successor on the KTM, Miguel Oliveira, was won.
You can feel a certain frustration with Espargaro, both for his own performances, which have not exactly sparked since he joined, and for the staccato-like approach to development, which is a little here, a little there.
It can also be argued that Honda is missing the input from Crutchlow. The Briton knew the Honda like no other, especially the racing trim, and while the results certainly faded towards the end, his honest assessments were never defeatist and he worked hard to come up with a package that would give him the best of opportunities without taking what is necessary to win Marquez. Honda’s loss, Yamaha’s gain.
In fact, perhaps the best clue to Honda’s suffering is in the LCR garage. Nakagami jumped from a 2019 title-winning machine to a 2021 spec model for this season and the jump didn’t suit him.
The Japanese have found themselves reverting to previous specifications or a mixture of three to rediscover the shape that had led it at times last year. It says a lot that his (and Honda) best result of four was on the 2020 motorcycle.
As for Alex Marquez, his predetermined move from Repsol to LCR has made him the Forgotten Driver of the Year 2021. We all expected a tough rookie campaign given his late completion on the seat, followed by another pressurized promotion to de facto (but not.) Realistic) team leadership in 2020.
But he saved an otherwise pretty anonymous year with two grandstand podium places in the wet at Le Mans and the following week in Aragon, which showed that trust in a tricky package alone can make up more than a few tenths.
His efforts on Race Day 2021 got better, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that he qualified last for each of the two most recent events.
Why qualifying problems really reveal the Honda problem
Still, he can draw (little) courage from the fact that Honda’s qualifying efforts in 2021 have gone from disappointing to gloomy. Honda’s qualifying record is telling indeed, not least because it can’t point so much to Marquez’s lack of fitness as to why he doesn’t do well over a single lap.
It has reduced the Spaniard to “caravanning” rivals – much to their annoyance and undoubtedly to his own frustration – but even if he or his teammates crack Q2, they are still nowhere to be seen in the front rows.
Marquez has the manufacturer’s best start to the year, finishing sixth on its comeback at Portimao, but of a possible 30 Q2 chances among its four drivers, it has only made a top 12 start ten times – Marquez twice, Espargaro four times, Nakagami twice, Bradl twice and Alex Marquez not once – and only three of them in the first three rows.
And it is this failure to turn on the RC213V in a single lap that leaves the riders in the pack and forces an under-fit Marquez to stretch out his cuffed elbows to move forward.
While more is to be expected from Marquez, it may not be as much as you think, as it’s hard to believe he’d win races on this bike regardless of whether he was fit or not.