The greatest rider of his generation is now on machinery from the dominant manufacturer. Is Marc Marquez ready to banish his recent struggles for Honda and reclaim his crown? As Orwell once wrote, ‘there’s time for everything except the things worth doing’. In Marquez’s case, the thing worth doing is being competitive again on a MotoGP bike. And time is not something he has infinite amounts of.
At 31 years old, Marquez is at least halfway through his MotoGP career, and for the past four seasons he has found himself facing myriad adversity. The badly broken arm in 2020 gave way to a season on the sidelines, and he was injury-plagued in 2021 and 2022, while his massive personal risk to go for a fourth major operation on his arm in 2022 was not matched in effort by Honda to give him a competitive bike last season.
Winless since 2021, when he was on a bike with which he very likely could have fought for the championship with a fully functioning right arm, Marquez came to a crossroads last year when the RC213V showed little form, and the initial 2024 prototype given to him at the post-race Misano test in September did nothing to improve confidence.
“I’m a winner and I’m a killer and I will try to do my best to try to fight at the top,” said Marquez, whose move to Gresini Racing on a year-old satellite Ducati was necessary if he has any hope of stopping too much time passing him by.
And naturally, it’s been the biggest talking point of the winter. His debut on the bike in the Valencia test turned heads, though the recent outings in Malaysia and Qatar brought some reality to the situation. Five days to unlearn 11 years of Honda tuition on a wildly different motorcycle has left Marquez coming into the 2024 campaign with his feet on the ground.
“It’s always in racing we say the last three tenths are the most difficult ones,” the eight-time world champion said at the end of the Qatar test. “So, it’s there where I am now. I’m two, three tenths, even four sometimes, behind the top guys. And now I have to understand how to be closer.”
On that final day of running in Qatar, Marquez had his first crash on the bike as he finally thrashed it. On single-lap pace, he was fourth overall, albeit 0.383 seconds off the best time. Long-run pace was solid in Malaysia, but hard to determine in Qatar based on available data. But even on average lap times from his short three-lap stint, he lagged some way…
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