Why Alex Marquez doesn't care about 'shutting up' MotoGP critics

Few gave Alex Marquez much of a chance ahead of his MotoGP debut last season. After all, he was stepping up to the factory Honda squad - a notoriously difficult bike in a high-pressure surrounding - and partnering his six-time world champion record-smashing brother Marc. When the move was announced in November of 2019, some - including this writer - worried it could seriously destabilise the younger Marquez's career.

And that wasn't a thought without merit. The bike Marquez was inheriting was one that only his brother could win a race on in 2019, and had effectively ended triple world champion Jorge Lorenzo's career.

Marquez's career was pointing in the right direction again at this point. After winning the Moto3 title in 2014, a move to Moto2 in 2015 with Marc VDS proved to be a difficult step. It would take him until Aragon in 2016 to score his first podium and until Jerez 2017 to finally win in the intermediate class.

The following year would pass without a victory, and Marc VDS sticking by him for 2019 felt like last chance saloon. Marquez's plight was only further highlighted by the meteoric ascension to MotoGP the likes of Maverick Vinales, Joan Mir and Alex Rins had managed when they stepped into the intermediate category.

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Marquez delivered the goods in 2019, seeing off KTM's Brad Binder to win the title with five victories. Regardless of whether Marc Marquez pushed Honda to sign his brother for 2020 - as is widely thought - Alex did at least deserve his promotion.

It wouldn't be enough to keep him his works team seat, HRC electing to sign Pol Espargaro from KTM to partner Marc Marquez, but Honda still felt Alex warranted a new two-year factory deal to go to LCR from 2021 before last season had even started. Still, it clearly showed not even Honda expected Alex Marquez to be the one to score its only podiums in 2020 with back-to-back seconds in France and Aragon - the latter coming in a fight for victory with Suzuki's Rins.

Alex Marquez has always had to carry the tag of 'brother of...' through his career, and while it will never truly go away, he broke free of Marc's shadow in 2020 and made people think twice. Not that he really cares what you think about him.

"Believe me, it's not my target to shut the people up," Marquez tells Autosport in an exclusive interview following LCR's 2021 launch event. "I'm a guy that believes in me and I believe in the work that I do at home and at the track. It's not my target for people to say 'ah, now you've shut up all the people that are speaking wrong about you'.

"It's not my target. I'm trying to do the best job that I can on track and be Alex Marquez. It's like this. It's so easy when you have a brother like Marc that people focus more on you or say wrong things about you. In racing it's normal, or Instagram, Twitter makes a lot of pain about that because now it's so easy to speak from one screen and to say something that is not really correct."

Avoiding internet trolls is one thing, but it's much harder to fly under the radar of the world's press. And invariably, he was continually assaulted with questions relating to his brother in 2020 - whether they be about his recovery from a broken arm, or what advice Marc was offering. Alex admits after a while it did start to grate, and even Marc's advice started to become a bit too much.

"Well, at one point a little bit, because always it was difficult for me to say something," he replied when asked if fielding questions about his brother became frustrating. "For sure, he said to me a lot of things to improve, to learn. But in the end, I'm alone on track. So, you can have the best brother in the world on your side and he can teach you a lot of things, but then you are alone on track and you need to learn from all sides and to remember all the thousand things he said to me.

"One point arrived when Honda opened their mind a little bit and realised it was difficult to fight for the championship in that point. They focused more on me and Nakagami, to open their mind, trying different things, different styles and to compare different things," Alex Marquez

"It's not easy and one point arrived in the season where I said to him 'leave me alone, please, don't say more things to me because already I need to process the things you said to me before'. But if you remember in Aragon press conference, I said to stop speaking about my brother because at that point I was a little bit on the limit in my head."

As Alex concedes, it was only a normal line of questioning given who is brother is. But to keep comparing them is folly. For starters, Marc Marquez is a unique rider. Secondly, it undermines the work Alex did with Honda across 2020 to get to a point where he could fight for podiums.

Not to make light of the situation, Marc's absence through injury was in many ways a benefit to all Honda riders, but Alex Marquez in particular. He believes he "learnt more from Honda" because it wasn't fully focused on making sure his older brother had a bike he could win the championship on. Having started the year with a set-up direction closer to that of Marc's, which he felt helped the bike turn better at the expense of a "critical" front-end.

As the season continued and Marquez made the "natural progression" of a rookie rider, he could adapt the bike to suit him more. And that's what happened at the Misano test after the San Marino GP, where various 'new' parts (they were old developments, but new to Alex) were tried with wheelbase adjustments. The results were immediate. Having scored a best of eighth in the first six rounds in the attrition of the Andalusian GP, he was seventh in the second Misano race, before getting that maiden podium two races later at a wet Le Mans, followed by his Aragon success.

"One point arrived when Honda opened their mind a little bit and realised it was difficult to fight for the championship in that point," he explained. "They focused more on me and [Takaaki] Nakagami to open the mind and to see also different things of Taka or me, trying different things, different styles and to compare different things.

"It was good, especially at the Misano test, to see those things. Honestly, at the Misano test Taka tried more things than me because I was just more focused on the set-up area, also some things, but things that were already made. Not things coming that were made for me. They were already on track with HRC, and they gave it to me, but it was already from 2018/2019 also to try different things with Taka, with Cal [Crutchlow], with Lorenzo, with Marc. With those things, I sensed a little bit the good bike for me and the feeling I needed in that moment."

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Naturally, much more is expected from Marquez in year two. The likes of Fabio Quartararo and Joan Mir have moved the goalposts big time in terms of sophomore expectation. But Marquez isn't falling into the trap of over-hype, and believes establishing consistent top seven performances early in 2021 will be key to him continuing his development towards becoming a rider who can reasonably expect podiums every weekend.

"After two, three races we'll see where we are and how we start," he says when asked about what a realistic target for 2021 results would be. "This will be the main thing, but I think to see the evolution from last year and how we grow up will be important. The target is to improve the qualy, this is the main thing, because it's difficult to start Sunday's race further back [on the grid].

"So, that part will be important, but to be more regularly in the top seven from the start will be important for me to grow up. It's the positions where you start to learn things from the top guys and where you start to learn the important things about the MotoGP category."

Only once in 2020 did Marquez qualify inside the top 10, the two Aragon races his only visits to Q2. Though he salvaged second from 11th in the dry at Aragon, he crashed out trying to do the same thing from 10th in the Teruel round. Such is the competitiveness of modern MotoGP, anything below the first three rows is a bit of a disaster. During LCR's launch, Marquez revealed his team studied data from some races and found he was losing up to seven seconds on the leaders in the first three laps due to poor qualifying form.

But Marquez is in the right environment to develop himself better as a rider. LCR - entering its 25th year in grand prix racing - has forged extremely close ties with Honda, scoring three wins since 2016 with its ex-rider Crutchlow. Though Marquez will have full factory backing (as will team-mate Nakagami) in 2021, he believes LCR being "a small family" will allow him to grow more.

"I hope yes, I hope it's a different way of working," he said when asked if LCR being like a family team would help him grow in 2021. "Being in an official team is nice and it's so nice to be in a factory team. But to be a factory rider in a satellite team is something that I think can help me to grow up, can help me to learn because it was a different year [in 2020] and I think I still have many things to learn and improve.

"I think from all the guys in the team I have something to learn, they can teach me, and I will try from everybody to learn something."

"I'm a guy that believes in me and I believe in the work that I do at home and at the track. It's not my target for people to say 'ah, now you've shut up all the people that are speaking wrong about you'," Alex Marquez

Marquez has a busy pre-season coming up, as the bulk of development work falls to himself and Nakagami with Marc Marquez likely to be sidelined still and Espargaro needing time to adapt to the RC213V. But this hasn't fazed him, his feet firmly planted on the ground as he approaches his second season in MotoGP.

It's this methodical approach to his racing and to how he navigates the unrelenting barrage of comparisons to his brother which made him one of the surprise packages of 2020. And continuing that growth with full factory support in a nurturing surrounding at LCR, there's no reason Alex Marquez can't be Honda's leading rider in 2021...