Is MotoGP's comeback king ready to reclaim his throne?

The 2022 season concluded with Marc Marquez having achieved two milestones. The first was his 100th podium in MotoGP, which he celebrated with a second-place finish at the Australian Grand Prix in October. Given his 99th came in 2021 at the Emilia Romagna GP, where he was still basically riding with one arm, a century of podiums was a longer time coming than anyone would have predicted. But then, nothing that has happened to Marquez over the past three years has been remotely predictable.

Despite a Honda bike that was proving difficult to manage, there was nothing to suggest during the COVID-delayed start to the 2020 season at Jerez that Marquez wouldn’t be adding another premier class title to his haul of six in seven years in MotoGP. The crash four laps from the end of the Spanish GP that resulted in him badly breaking his right arm began a prolonged period of misery for the Spaniard, one that wouldn’t really come to an end until he stood on that podium at Phillip Island.

PLUS: The signs the old Marquez is really back to trouble his MotoGP rivals

There have been four operations since the crash, the final of which came at the end of May this year when he elected to pause his season after the Italian GP to go to the US to have the bone in his right arm rebroken and rotated over 30 degrees back to its original position. Marquez takes a pragmatic view of his injury when he sits down with Autosport in Honda’s private office on the eve of the final round of 2022 at Valencia.

“Of course, many times you think a lot of things about your arm,” he says when asked what goes through his mind when he looks at the numerous scars. “And many times it’s difficult to realise sometimes or admit that you have this injury. But, in the end you must say, ‘OK, this is what I have'.

“It’s true that I had the fourth surgery, it’s true that an arm that has been opened four times will never be a normal arm, because you have some limitations. But then you need to accept those limitations, try to compensate with your body, with different things. I’m not thinking a lot about it, just how to improve, about how to manage it, how to adapt.”

PLUS: The human importance of Marquez’s latest enforced MotoGP absence

Marquez has regularly been compared to a machine in the way he used to dispatch his rivals so clinically and emphatically when he romped to his six MotoGP titles between 2013-2019. Certainly, when he speaks of his arm now, he does nothing to dispel the robotic accusations when he tells this writer that his arm is “working like a normal arm. When I say normal, I mean mechanical. On the mechanical side, it’s working normal, but it’s true that the ‘software’ – which means the muscles, the nerves, all these things – still they are growing".

Marquez returned for the Aragon GP after missing six races due to another arm surgery

Photo by: Gold and Goose/Motorsport Images

Marquez returned to action at the Aragon GP in September to begin an extended on-bike recovery period after six rounds on the bench, knowing that he would never be 100% fit without putting his arm through the strains of riding a MotoGP beast. Over the final six races, signs of the old Marquez steadily began to show.

In the wet Japanese GP qualifying in his second race back, he showed he’d lost none of his instincts on the bike to take a first pole since 2019. Throughout the following weekend in Thailand, he was making mistakes and saving moments on the way into corners like he used to – something which, since breaking his arm in 2020 and prior to his fourth surgery, he was unable to do. And then came his Phillip Island rostrum.

“We are always talking about my physical condition, but I’m the best Honda rider in the championship missing – I don’t know – seven, eight races" Marc Marquez

There was no fairytale victory like there was on three occasions in 2021 when he came back for the first time – albeit two of those came on anti-clockwise tracks that put less strain on his right shoulder, and the other was a result of a crash for another rider.

But it had become clear to Marquez in the early races of 2022, either side of his two-round layoff after a practice crash in Indonesia with a recurring vision issue (the same issue that forced him to miss the final two races of 2021, and which threatened his career when the injury first occurred in 2011 while he was still in Moto2), that his time in MotoGP was nearing its end if nothing could be done about his arm. Unable to ride in the way he needed to, he had long been evaluating a fourth operation, but was not given the go-ahead until the Friday of the Italian GP in late May, once it was clear that his bone was ready for it following consultation.

His time away from the paddock while he recovered also gave Marquez chance to thoroughly evaluate what was going wrong at Honda. By the end of the Italian GP, HRC had just one podium to its credit courtesy of Pol Espargaro in the season-opening Qatar GP. A difficult winter on the radically overhauled RC213V preceded myriad struggles for all four Honda riders, Marquez included.

As European powerhouses Ducati and Aprilia took major steps forward in 2022, the working methods and mentality of the Japanese manufacturers as they lagged behind was under scrutiny. Marquez made a visit to the paddock in Austria during his recovery in what turned out to be something of a rallying cry for Honda.

Pol Espargaro was the second highest Honda rider in the standings, 57 points behind Marquez despite doing seven more rounds

Photo by: Gold and Goose/Motorsport Images

Such were its problems in 2022 that Marquez, who had missed eight races and crashed out of two more, still ended the year as the marque’s top rider by a staggering 57 points. He found that the 2022 RC213V had lost the front-end feeling he needs to extract the best from his riding style in order to fix the bike’s rear-grip issues. This prompted his Austria visit, since he felt he was too out of the loop on his previous layoffs due to injury in 2020 and late 2021, and which ultimately forced Honda into its shift in philosophy with its 2022 bike.

When the subject of Honda’s philosophy is brought up, Marquez approaches his answer with caution, noting that “I’m not the guy to say to Honda you must change strategy”, and points out that some concessions must be given, because the Japanese marques were hit harder by the COVID pandemic since many engineers had to spend the 2020 and 2021 seasons exiled in Europe due to travel restrictions. But he is keen to point out that making one step forward with its bike for 2023 won’t be enough for Honda.

“We are always talking about my physical condition, but I’m the best Honda rider in the championship missing – I don’t know – seven, eight races,” he says matter-of-factly. “So, where is the level of my bike and where is my level? I know that I can improve, but to fight for the championship now every time the bike becomes more and more important because you have more things: aerodynamics, the holeshot [device], the rear device.

“And they [Honda] know, and they realise and they accept that they must change something and they know that next year they need to take not one but two steps, because the other manufacturers will do one step and then we are [already] one step behind. So, you need to do one plus one to be equal. So, they are working very hard to do it.”

Marquez came away from the first test for 2023 following the Valencia GP in November less than enthused about what Honda had delivered him, although the reality seems to be more positive than he made out at the time, when he said the bike he rode wouldn’t be enough for him to fight for the world championship.

Had Honda elected to ditch some of its past ways and allowed its departing runners in Pol Espargaro (who is KTM-bound with Tech3 in 2023) and Marquez’s younger brother Alex (off to Gresini Ducati) to continue to test new items, perhaps it would be a bit further along with its 2023 prototype. It would have been a move welcomed by Marquez Sr, although he points out that it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

Following the first test for 2023 after the Valencia GP, Marquez didn't rate Honda's chances for the upcoming campaign

Photo by: Gold and Goose/Motorsport Images

“At the Misano test [in September], I was riding the same bike as Pol and I was already in front,” he explains. “And I was coming back from an injury. So, then if you are fast or if I come back and I am slower than another Honda rider, they will give it to the fastest rider because they will try it in a better way. But when I arrived in Misano with the same bike exactly as Pol I was faster than him. So, then Honda said, ‘OK, we will give Marc everything'.”

Even through all of Marquez’s injury woes, Honda has made it clear how vital he is to its cause and its hopes of digging itself out of the depth in which it sits following a second winless season in three years – unprecedented for the make, given it had won at least one race every year from the point when it returned full-time to MotoGP in 1982 through to the end of 2019. But the time Honda has to convince him to commit his future is beginning to run out.

“I feel a lot of respect for Honda, because the way that during these two years that I was injured, the way that they take care of me was special" Marc Marquez

Marquez is in the middle of a four-year deal to take him to the end of 2024 thought to be worth around €100million. Through the COVID years and his injury layoffs, Honda has honoured its agreement to him, and this is a fact that is not lost on the eight-time world champion (including his 125cc and Moto2 titles).

This hasn’t stopped rumours already spreading of rival marques expressing interest in him. At 29, Marquez still has at least another decade of racing in him if he wants it – and he very much believes he can still fight for the title and wants to do so with Honda. But he seemingly makes his first real suggestions that there is the potential for a life outside of Honda if MotoGP titles are on the line.

“I feel a lot of respect for Honda, because the way that during these two years that I was injured, the way that we speak, the way that they take care of me was special,” Marquez concedes, adding that “in past contracts, I respected them a lot and Honda always had the first option and I didn’t speak with anybody”.

“I know that [treatment] was not normal, but it was special, and 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.

Even Marquez has struggled to tame Honda's latest creation

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“But now in 2022 I only want to stay with Honda, and staying with Honda is my target. But, my biggest target is to win championships. So, this is what I will look at for the future. So, yeah, for the future we will see. You never know. As I say, Honda is Honda, it’s my dream to stay in Honda. But my biggest dream is to win championships.”

The path to that next world championship – which would put him equal with Valentino Rossi’s once-thought-unmatchable tally of nine titles overall – hasn’t gotten any easier. While the old rivals such as Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo, Dani Pedrosa and Andrea Dovizioso are gone, in their place has come the new, fresh breed of fast superstars in the forms of 2022 world champion Francesco Bagnaia, predecessor Fabio Quartararo and Enea Bastianini.

Their own merits as genuinely great riders will be validated when they can fight fair and square with Marquez. He brushes off our question asking him if he is quietly confident that at full strength, both physically and in terms of machinery, he can swiftly move back to the top of the pile. But he does pass caution that the nature of bikes now in MotoGP is making riding them “less manual”, and thus it’s harder for the rider to make the difference. It leads him to warn MotoGP of going down a path similar to Formula 1, where he believes the importance of the car outweighs the driver.

“The guys at the top are always the fastest guys,” Marquez says. “It’s true that now, or by the years, every time the machine I feel is [becoming] more important than the rider. Still the rider is more important than the machine – or this is what I want to believe.

“But every time you are depending more on what you have, because if you don’t have the bike you can’t do anything. It’s not like Formula 1, which is another extreme, but we are going in that way and we need to be careful. And I said already in some safety commissions that, 'Guys, we need to be careful because in the end we need to keep it that the riders are more important than the bikes'.”

Marquez goes into another winter break facing uncertainty in his future, but the second milestone he has achieved in 2022 is that the worst of his plight does genuinely look like it’s finally behind him.

Second in the Australian GP showed Marquez could still mix it at the front

Photo by: Gold and Goose/Motorsport Images

Honda faces a long winter as it looks to give Marquez the tools he needs to fight for the championship he still believes is possible, something he has proven with the way he has developed post-fourth surgery in 2022. But with Marquez back at the helm, his leadership as much as his talent should steer HRC in the direction it needs to go.

As we wrap up our chat, the future isn’t the most pressing thing on his mind. Reflecting on everything he has been through, Marquez ends on a note of contentment since he achieved his most important victory this year: a happier life.

"For the future, we will see if I have enough power, enough strength, enough possibilities to fight for the championship" Marc Marquez

“For me, looking at this season, the sentence is this: I chose the correct decision, because one option was to finish the season and let’s see [how his arm was],” he concludes. “But now, thinking that it could have been Valencia and then an operation and then a full winter with recovery, I was not ready to do it – on the mental side also. So, I chose the correct option to take the operation, to break my arm again and put it straight.

“For the future, we will see if I have enough power, enough strength, enough possibilities to fight for the championship. Life is better, coming in a normal way. I’ve started to do some motocross training, so it’s coming in a good way.”

And a Marc Marquez that is happy is a Marc Marquez to be feared by his rivals…

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Photo by: Gold and Goose/Motorsport Images