The Marquez risk Honda has taken with its 2022 MotoGP bike

MotoGP 2022 is fast speeding towards us as the first pre-season test of the year concluded on Sunday after two days of running at the Sepang International Circuit. Topped outright by Gresini’s Enea Bastianini on a 2021-spec Ducati, there were many intriguing revelations and pertinent questions posed up and down the grid.

All of those, in due course, will be covered by Autosport as we begin to make sense of all that lays in front of us ahead of the new campaign beginning on 6 March in Qatar. But for now, the focus is on Honda and the return of Marc Marquez.

The six-time world champion spent three uncertain months on the sidelines when double vision problems emerged following a concussion that he suffered in a training accident prior to the Algarve Grand Prix. It ruled Marquez out of the final two rounds of the 2021 campaign, but more crucially kept him from taking part in two vital days of November's Jerez test on the 2022 Honda prototype.

Marquez’s injury woes since 2020, when he badly broke his right arm at the start of that year’s campaign, has hindered Honda for the best part of a year and a half. Though he won three races last year, Honda’s other riders – Pol Espargaro, Takaaki Nakagami and Alex Marquez – faced incredibly tough campaigns.

But Marquez’s 2020 absence and his steady recovery in 2021 forced Honda into diving deeper to fix the RC213V's key issue of a lack of rear traction. The feedback after the Jerez test from the likes of Espargaro, Nakagami and Marquez Jr was that the rear of the radically-revised Honda was much better – but with any change, it brought about some new challenges.

The new Honda is fundamentally different in its philosophy, as the 2022 RC213V is now a rear-biased bike. Given rear traction was the main issue last year, that’s hardly surprising. For many a year, it’s been reasoned that Marc Marquez has been outclassing the machinery under him. Given he was 42 points clear of the next-best Honda of Espargaro in the standings last year, despite missing four races and crashing out of four others, that theory holds some merit. Espargaro himself, however, said earlier this year that Marquez’s way of riding is just better.

PLUS: Why a difficult 2021 hasn't broken one Honda MotoGP ace's resolve

Regardless, Honda has largely avoided major overhauls because the reality is it didn’t want to do anything to impede Marquez’s way of riding. No matter how good or bad the RC213V has been since 2013, he’s won six titles and 54 races on it.

Honda has tended to steer clear of changes that would adversely affect its talisman Marquez, even to the detriment of its other riders

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Espargaro is correct in his observation of Marquez’s riding style. Given it was so rear-limited in the past, Marquez could outshine it with his aggressive corner entry. He had an unparalleled feel for the front, which was why he was able to make so many wild saves before his arm injury.

On the Saturday at Sepang, Marquez crashed twice. One was his own fault, he admitted, but the other at the left-handed Turn 9 left him baffled because he doesn’t understand the front of the new Honda right now.

“One of the things I must learn, and I need to understand, is the front feeling,” Marquez said. “That’s changed a lot. It’s true – and one mistake was completely mine – one time I crashed and still don’t completely understand why, because I didn’t make anything [strange]. So, all these things, plus a long time without riding the GP bike created [a situation] where still I don’t understand well how to ride this bike. The lap time was coming, but I don’t know why.”

"Normally our bike and the way Marc rode for many, many years, it was everything [placed] on the entry. So, looks like we need to stop the bike in a different point" Alex Marquez

Marquez then admitted he is having to “sacrifice a bit” his key strength of corner entry. As the likes of Andrea Dovizioso, who is struggling to adapt to the Yamaha in 2022 after eight years of riding a Ducati, and Maverick Vinales – who is still acclimatising to the Aprilia after four-and-a-bit years on a Yamaha – can attest, simply changing your riding style isn’t an easy process, not least when it concerns the element of your riding that made you so strong.

Marquez’s test has also been somewhat conditioned by the fact he only returned to bike training two weeks ahead of Sepang. Noting that the muscle preparation needed to ride a MotoGP bike “you cannot replicate in a gym”, Marquez couldn’t try much on Saturday as he dedicated that day to understanding how to ride the new Honda by back-to-backing it with the 2021-spec.

On Sunday he had to cut short his programme as he was “not riding in a good way”, and had plans to test more in the afternoon – though these were scuppered by the arrival of rain. With the final three days of testing taking place at the completely new Mandalika track in Indonesia, this will surely further complicate his adaptation process – although he insisted Sepang would be the tougher of the two tests when Autosport asked him how difficult testing at a new venue was going to be.

Marquez isn’t the only rider to struggle with the front end of the new Honda. Both Alex Marquez and Espargaro tend to prioritise corner exit to make up their lap time. But neither have been as badly affected by the effects of Honda’s philosophy change, with Alex Marquez keen to point out that the front is neither better or worse than before. “It’s just different,” he observed.

“I mean, about what Marc said about front performance, it’s not worse or better – it’s just different,” Marquez went on when Autosport put his brother’s comments to him. “I mean, the riding style is quite different, you need to think a bit more about the exit than the entry.

Marquez struggled to feel what the front-end of his bike was doing on corner entry in Sepang

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

“Normally our bike and the way Marc rode for many, many years, it was everything [placed] on the entry. So, looks like we need to stop the bike in a different point, not really deep. This is where Marc is struggling a little bit. Still me, I didn’t discover the secret of this bike, because we still need to make a lot of improvements.”

Espargaro added: “The bike is not perfect yet, we need to spend a lot of time improving. All the riders, including myself, need to improve the way of riding because it’s still a little bit strange. The front is not perfect, for me it’s not a big, big problem because my riding style is based on the rear. But the better the front is, the less crashes we are going to have.”

Marquez’s Sepang test wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination. Finishing eighth overall, he was just 0.201 seconds off the pace inside a top 18 covered by under a second (though this must be caveated by the fact a lot of riders never did proper time attack runs on the final day because of the rain).

But even if the lap times can’t be read into greatly, Marquez did note that he found it “easier” to find a time over a single lap on the 2022 bike. Getting the best out of a new tyre in qualifying trim has been a real problem for Honda riders recently, with Espargaro explaining in Malaysia that it was previously very difficult to heat up the front tyre on out-laps because the lack of rear traction made the front end quite critical under braking.

However, the 2022 Honda’s philosophy shift has made it “safer” to ride – with Espargaro echoing Marquez’s “easier” comment. Espargaro also explained Honda’s revised aerodynamic package is helping to load the front under braking, so it seems HRC has at least accounted for the effects its focus on improving the rear of the bike has had.

It’s evident Honda has built a bike with genuine promise as it looks to make something rideable for everyone – not just the otherworldly talent of Marc Marquez. But in turn it has done the thing it has tried to avoid doing for so many years, which is build a bike that is – currently – working against the six-time world champion.

But this isn’t the first time Marquez’s style hasn’t gelled with a bike. Back in 2015, the RC213V struggled for rear grip, while an over-aggressive engine braking system kept overloading the front of the bike and caused Marquez to crash numerous times. While Honda did eventually get on top of this problem, Marquez also recognised that he had to simply settle for the best on offer on the days when the bike was out of its depth.

Honda, of course, hasn't deliberately built its 2022 bike knowing it would affect Marquez’s riding style. But equally, it knows that if anyone is going to figure out how to ride the bike, it’s Marc Marquez.

New Honda is apparently easier to gain laptime from

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images