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 behind.
“Still there are three, four, five riders faster than us, especially [Jorge] Martin, [Francesco] Bagnaia, [Enea] Bastianini are faster than us,” was Marquez’s summary at the end of testing. Marquez has always said – publicly at least – that his aim coming into 2024 is not solely the title. After the past few years, he just needs to know whether he can be competitive again. Few doubt he will be, 2023 runner-up Martin telling the media in Malaysia that he expects his fellow Spaniard to be fighting for victory straight away in Qatar.
Marquez has embarked on a campaign of hype-diffusion this winter, noting in the final test that he “will face a big frustration” at this stage if he aims for race wins from the start. The beauty of testing, though, is that it’s one big phoney war: few things are ever as they seem. And so, perhaps everything from Marquez over the winter has been one big lie. Maybe his lack of long runs in the Qatar test and apparent deficit was a deliberate ploy to hide his true potential on the GP23, which won the championship last year, to keep pressure fully off him – or, more frighteningly, show his rivals some mercy.
What does look certain, however, is that 2024 will be much like 2023 in that Ducati looks hard to topple. After winning a record 17 grands prix last year with six of its eight riders, and all three world titles, the Italian manufacturer is a powerhouse now. While concessions have been brought in, targeted at pegging Ducati back, Gigi Dall’Igna appears to have crafted an altogether more potent weapon at his Bologna-based skunkworks. The GP24 topped both tests in February outright with reigning double world champion Bagnaia.
A title win for Martin last year would have earned him an automatic promotion for 2024. As such, he now has to prove himself all over again
After obliterating lap records as he went, the Turin rider begins the season appearing more confident than ever: “The feeling right now is incredible. I think the 24 [bike] is better in all the areas, in every area, than the 23. It’s a mix of all the good things from the 22 and the good things from the 23. So, right now at the moment it’s working perfectly.”
If you removed sprints from the equation last year, Bagnaia was world champion by a country mile. Martin, on identical factory Ducati machinery run by Pramac, kept things interesting with his sprint supremacy in the second half of the season, but key errors in grands prix ultimately kept him away from the title.
Martin will have learned from those mistakes for 2024. While he ended testing somewhat concerned about a tyre vibration issue that didn’t seem to plague any other Ducati rider, the young Madrid ace will almost certainly be a contender from the off. And he needs to be. The Ducati stable is crowded with talent, and all of them will be looking at a step to the factory squad in 2025. Bagnaia is a shoo-in to stay put, meaning Bastianini’s seat will be hotly contested by the Italian and riders such as Martin, VR46’s Marco Bezzecchi – who was third in the championship last year – and Marquez.
A title win for Martin last year would have earned him an automatic promotion for 2024. As such, he now has to prove himself all over again. That won’t be easy with the quality he will face, not least in a Bastianini who appears to have rediscovered his best form after a 2023 campaign largely plagued by injury and difficulties adapting to the GP23.
Bezzecchi’s decision to stay at VR46 instead of taking a factory Ducati at Pramac was largely taken with the view that his next step should be to a works squad. The step the GP24 has seemingly taken over the GP23 suggests that those on VR46 and Gresini-run bikes may have a trickier time matching their factory counterparts.
But that doesn’t mean civil war isn’t likely. Martin has a point to prove; Bezzecchi doesn’t like Marquez very much; Bastianini could pose the same problems for Bagnaia as he did in 2022; all of them are at risk of being shown up by Marquez on an older bike. But this is the way Ducati has engineered things: it wants all of its riders to be competitive, and it doesn’t much care at the end of the day who takes the crown – so long as the bike model they are riding begins with ‘GP’.
Ducati’s European rivals appear to have taken a step. Aprilia has, in Aleix Espargaro’s words, delivered him its best RS-GP ever – albeit one that he thinks needs more mid-range torque to be a true title contender. Its radical aero concept drew eyes, and its speed was consistent throughout both tests. Espargaro seems in better shape on it than team-mate Maverick Vinales, who needs to step up in 2024 if he is to justify any more time on a prime factory ride on which he has continually underdelivered.
KTM delivered a fairly quiet pre-season with its RC16, but both Brad Binder and Jack Miller come into this year positive about the steps made on a bike that has been developed with the help of Red Bull Technologies in Milton Keynes. Aprilia won two grands prix in 2023, and KTM was a factor on occasion, with Binder enjoying a couple of sprint wins. Both need to show marked improvement, not least given the benefits both will enjoy in terms of concessions over Ducati.
Making concessions count will be vital in Yamaha and Honda taking the steps forward they both need to get back to the front in MotoGP. The Japanese marques lumbered to the bottom of the constructors’ table in 2023. Honda scored one victory courtesy of Alex Rins – now at Yamaha – at Austin, but it was a result that proved to be an outlier in an otherwise miserable year. Yamaha registered its first winless campaign in 20 years, 2021 world champion Fabio Quartararo scoring a handful of podiums on his way to 10th in the riders’ standings.
The concessions system was revived in a bid to help the struggling Japanese manufacturers. As such, its factory riders will need to get used to a lot of testing this year. Yamaha went on a recruitment drive over the winter in which it poached Dall’Igna’s right-hand man Max Bartolini from Ducati as technical director, while aerodynamicist Marco Nicotra was also snared. Continuing to work with Luca Marmorini (formerly of Ferrari and Toyota in Formula 1) on the engine side has yielded the much-requested increase in power.
But the grip issues Yamaha has suffered from on new soft tyres persists, with Quartararo calling it an unacceptable problem in testing. He is enthused by Bartolini’s way of working after such a short time, but Yamaha is not making the progress Quartararo needs to keep him around beyond 2024. In Rins, at least, Yamaha will benefit from knowledge of Suzuki and Honda machinery.
When Honda took its latest RC213V to the Valencia test for 2020 world champion Joan Mir and Marquez’s replacement Luca Marini, the bike had shed a whopping 8kg and genuinely seemed like a step forward. As winter testing concluded, the atmosphere in the Honda camp was one of optimism – but Marini’s calls for patience signalled where Honda still is. And that is not very far forward from where it was.
Traction remains the biggest issue, which is affecting the bike on acceleration and in braking. Mir noted in the Qatar test that he felt like Honda was getting closer with every run on the new bike, and that is encouraging at least.
What will be telling is how Honda responds if Marquez, the rider who gave it so much and outperformed its difficult bike, proves his decision to leave was correct
Having freedom to test in-season and develop its engine means Honda isn’t facing the same misery as 2023, and its internal restructuring has been welcomed as “more efficient” by LCR boss Lucio Cecchinello – who brings Johann Zarco from Ducati to his team in place of Rins. Marquez always said Honda would benefit from his leaving by being able to invest what it was paying him into the bike. That seems true enough for now as a long 21-round campaign approaches.
What will be telling, though, is how Honda responds if the rider who gave it so much and outperformed its difficult bike proves his decision to leave was correct. As testing drew to a close, there was little doubt he’s right…
MotoGP’s next superstar?
Only one rookie steps up to MotoGP in 2024, and he may well be ‘the chosen one’. At 19, Pedro Acosta has brought with him the kind of hype that comes associated with a racer potentially carving themselves out as a generational talent.
Acosta made his grand prix debut in Moto3 in 2021, took his first win after starting from the pitlane, and claimed the title at the first time of asking. He was a race winner in his first year in Moto2 in 2022 and then scooped the crown last season.
Before his coronation, his move to MotoGP with KTM had already been assured. Since the Austrian marque finally found him a place at the GasGas-branded Tech3 squad, Acosta’s early development has been closely watched.
Impressive in testing on the RC16, he is tempering expectations. The Spaniard admits he still has “a long road” of adaptation to come. Marc Marquez believes he will be a world champion sooner rather than later.
When Autosport sat down with Acosta in Liverpool at the FIM Awards last December, he noted how his entire racing life has been nothing but pressure – so now it’s a normal thing for him. With a flair of the showman – and a deep-rooted love of road racing, in particular Michael Dunlop – Acosta for his age has a highly astute sense of what is needed from him as a representative (and ultimately a salesman) for MotoGP.
The bar for KTM rookies is high, thanks to Brad Binder’s victory heroics after just three races in 2020. Expecting a repeat is not fair on Acosta, and he notes that a strong debut in Qatar won’t be a “real” result given the last test took place there.
That feet-on-the-ground approach is a good sign. But there’s little doubt that Acosta will be on a MotoGP podium before long.
