“I will always have full respect for Honda. But now my mind is only on coming back to the top with Honda. Then of course, if I cannot, because I feel like I don’t have the tools, I will try to find the best for me. And this is something that I already said to them.”
On the eve of the 2022 Valencia Grand Prix, Autosport sat down with Marc Marquez to speak about the season just gone and his hopes of returning to the front of the MotoGP grid now he has fully recovered from the right arm he badly broke in 2020.
The above quote (published in the 22 December 2022 issue of Autosport magazine) was his response when asked, if Honda’s ongoing struggles could not be resolved, is he already looking at his next career move beyond 2024. Now, on the eve of the 2023 Valencia GP, Marquez once again sits down with Autosport… and is facing his final race with Honda.
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Marquez’s decision to join Gresini Racing on a year-old Ducati for 2024 may have come as a shock when it was first touted back in September. But the warning had already been issued to Honda.
Despite scoring pole in the opening round in Portugal, the form of the 2023 Honda didn’t suggest it would be a match for MotoGP’s now dominant European marques. Indeed, as we head to the final round of the campaign, the stats make for grim reading.
In 19 rounds this season, Marquez has just one grand prix podium – which came in the wet in Japan. He has 27 crashes, equalling his top tally for a campaign, and has just 89 points to his credit. At current pace, he is on course to register his worst ever season points haul, having missed five rounds with injury.
All of this from a partnership that has yielded six world titles in eight years and 59 MotoGP victories between 2013 and 2021.
So, it’s not difficult to see why he made the decision he did. But don’t mistake his desire to win with one of cold calculation. Spending his entire MotoGP career with Honda, leaving – and only being able to take one of his current crew, tyre technician Javi Ortiz, with him – was no easy decision.
“[It’s] difficult and still difficult to realise that next week I will have my last race with Honda this year… in the future, you never know. But at least right now [it’s the last],” Marquez tells Autosport during the Qatar GP in an interview organised by Red Bull.
“But it’s true that it will be a super difficult and emotional weekend in Valencia. At the moment, I don’t realise a lot and I’m just focused on the race track and trying to do my 100%. But it will be a very strange Valencia GP and will be a very strange Tuesday test, riding another bike and [seeing] different faces in the garage.”
Marquez says the smoothness of his exit is “easy to explain” because “our relationship has always been very honest”, not to mention “very successful”
As Valencia nears, it’s hard not to think on how different Marquez’s exit from Honda has been to that of fellow MotoGP legend Valentino Rossi’s back in 2003. Now, the circumstances were very different. Rossi was at the top of his game and the RC211V was all-conquering. HRC’s unwillingness to acknowledge Rossi’s role in its success forced him to move to Yamaha, with Honda stopping him from testing the M1 until 2004 when his contract was officially up.
Marquez had a year left on his deal with Honda, which he penned at the start of 2020 after his sixth world title in seven years, and was worth a considerable chunk of money – some estimates suggesting it being in the region of €100m. Marquez agonised over the decision to leave, and finally pulled the trigger after the Japanese GP, in which he scored his only Sunday podium of the year.
The writing was on the wall at the Misano test, though, when the first 2024 Honda prototype failed to produce much in the way of enthusiasm. Honda’s recruitment drive to sign top European engineering talent also ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Marquez says the smoothness of his exit is “easy to explain” because “our relationship has always been very honest”, not to mention “very successful”. He described it as a “win-win” – he had a team he loved, and Honda had a rider who could extract the absolute maximum out of a bike that was not the easiest. The fact he thinks leaving is also a “win-win” decision reveals a lot about how he views Honda right now.
“I will move to a bike that is leading the championship and I will try to achieve my target, which is to try to feel competitive again,” he adds. “Feeling competitive doesn’t mean winning, it just means to feel competitive and ride more comfortably and try to fight for the top positions in some races.
“The reality is that all the budget they pay to me will go to the bike. That is also important. My comfort zone was here, to stay here and ride the bike and take the salary and no pressure. But I believe now the best for the project is that they will invest all of [what they paid me] into the bike. Honda is Honda. Honda will come back to the top with or without me. So, I believe they can do it.”
Racers are generally ragingly egotistical, but there is sincerity in Marquez’s voice when he talks about Honda’s prospects of returning to the front of the grid. There has also been sincerity when he has repeatedly stated that his move is purely about having fun again, trying to get rid of doubts in his head about his own performance, especially after what happened to him in 2020.
Asked if he believes he would be facing his Honda swansong right now without his Jerez crash, Marquez concedes it contributed – but highlights that Honda was already struggling at this point.
“Of course, in Jerez 2020 it changed everything in my career, and also a consequence was the results from Honda,” he begins. “But is it the responsibility of Honda’s situation right now? I mean, in the end I had many strong team-mates in the other side of the garage, like [Dani] Pedrosa, [Jorge] Lorenzo, in 2020 my brother [Alex Marquez], then Pol Espargaro, then Joan Mir who is another world champion.
“I have been always the best Honda in the championship, even in 2021 and 2022. And this year. So, this is something where I always try to give my comments and try to develop the bike in the best way possible for the target to win. But also, they have other strong riders, like Lorenzo for example, who arrived from Ducati where he was winning. And in Honda he retired.
“Pol Espargaro was a bit the same. He arrived from KTM, was fourth in the championship the previous year, and then arrived and struggled. And Joan Mir and Alex Rins: last year they were winning races, and they arrive here [at Honda] and are struggling. So, in the end, of course, I would like to come back and move on a little bit and forget that day in Jerez. But it was like this.”
Indeed, Pedrosa suffered his first winless campaign in MotoGP in 2018 before deciding to retire – while Marquez won the title by 76 points. Winning three races with Ducati in 2018, Lorenzo didn’t even register a top 10 on the Honda before announcing his retirement a season into a two-year deal in 2019. Marquez was 151 points clear as the champion.
In 2020, Honda suffered its first winless season since it returned full-time in 1982, while in 2021 Marquez won three times with his right arm well below fitness and was 42 points clear of the next-best Honda in the standings. Last year marked a second winless campaign for Honda, with Marquez its leader in 13th in the table – 57 points clear of the next HRC runner - despite missing eight races.
All being well, Marquez will make his public debut on the 2023-spec Ducati that has won the riders’ championship on Tuesday, 28 November two days after what will surely be an emotional final (at least for now) outing with Honda.
“My comfort zone was to stay in Honda, and 95% of riders would have stayed at Honda"
The expectation is that he will probably top the test and clean up next year, completely destabilise the entire Ducati structure with his dominance on a year-old bike and celebrate a seventh premier class world title.
In reality, Marquez knows that staying at Honda would have acted as perfect cover: if the results aren’t great, clearly it’s the bike – look at how the rest of the HRC stable is doing compared to him. By going to the best bike on the grid, there are no excuses.
“Yeah, of course it’s a possibility and of course I have some doubts,” he openly replies when asked if he is scared the move to Ducati won’t work. “Even now that I’ve taken the decision, I have doubts. And it’s a possibility that it doesn’t work. But in the end, when I will retire some day, I will retire quiet because I tried everything in my career. And I did what I feel.
“And if I stayed at Honda and I stayed shy [saying] ‘no, I will not do this because if it’s not successful everybody will push me’. OK, I accept if it’s not a successful move. I will accept the criticism and I will accept all these things. But at least I will retire in a quiet way because I will try everything. I am like this.
“My comfort zone was to stay in Honda, and 95% of riders would have stayed at Honda. Why? Big salary, no pressure, now I will develop the bike, [saying] ‘OK, this race was not good because we are developing the bike’. [Staying] was easy. But I’m not like this.
“I’m a winner and I’m a killer and I will try to do my best to try to fight at the top.”
Watch Marc Marquez: All In on Red Bull TV: https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/shows/marc-marquez-all-in
