Repsol Honda boss, Alberto Puig finally acknowledged that Honda’s achievements, both the factory team and the satellite team in MotoGP, had fallen since Marc Marquez suffered an injury at the Jerez GP, Spain in 2020. Although it was an open secret, Honda had never explicitly mentioned Honda’s decline in performance due to the loss of Marquez. However, one of them is because the direction of motor development is not quite right.
“I think, if you look back at 2020, we had Covid and Marc was injured and since then all we have experienced is a decline,” said the manager of the Repsol Honda team on Wednesday (5/7/2023).
When Marquez was injured, Honda did not have a reliable weapon. Meanwhile, he is one of the keys to the development of the RC213V motorbike. At the same time, European manufacturers such as Ducati, KTM and Aprilia are intensively innovating. Then, on the other hand, the Honda technicians and engineers who developed the motorbike were constrained by geographical problems.
In the 2020 season, when the pandemic was at its height, Japan carried out isolation until it canceled hosting MotoGP. This isolation prevented Honda’s technicians and engineers from returning to Japan to carry out motor development. Then at that point the focus was only on racing in Europe.
“Marc’s situation is really complicated from a rider’s point of view with his injury. But also from a company’s point of view, it’s not easy for our engineers to travel back to Japan, so they have to stay in Europe,” said Puig.
“They couldn’t develop the bike like they used to because they didn’t go back to Japan and exchange a lot of information. So suddenly in a Covid situation like this you miss things like this,” said Puig.
Unfortunately Marquez’s injury lasted for years. In the 2022 season, the Spanish racer was not 100 percent fit until he finally had his fourth operation so that his arm could return to normal. Then in 2023 when his arm was starting to heal, he had two cases of diplopia which also had to be addressed.
It’s no wonder that during the 2020-2023 season, Honda experienced a sharp decline in performance. “So suddenly one day you lose two tenths, then four tenths, then one second and it’s history. I don’t think it was a particular moment, but it just so happened that it brought us to the current situation,” said Puig.
