Crunch time for MotoGP legend as first chapter of 2024 beckons
September 8th, 2023 6:00 am
The factory Honda team has scored an outrageous 27 points for the entire year to date. Fully 17 riders have scored more points than that, including satellite LCR rider Álex Rins, who’s finished only three grands prix this season. Slow and steady and devoid of any risk-taking, the storied Spaniard rode his Honda home 12th and more than 14 seconds behind winner Francesco Bagnaia., of his first finish for 2023 some five months into the season.But obviously this sort of style isn’t tenable in the long term for Márquez. The six-time MotoGP champion isn’t built to go slowly, and at 30 years old he isn’t built to ride around for any great number of years waiting for the Honda bike to catch him up either.
While Márquez and Mir would both surely love to see Honda wheel out a bike on Monday in Misano featuring a class-leading aero package, both know this isn’t going to happen. This sort of problem isn’t solved overnight, and in any case it’s too early in the 2024 cycle for the finished product to be on offer.
For Yamaha the importance of next week’s test might appear less extreme given its bike is less of a disaster, having been able to score at every grand prix this season. “This year I did not want to see that PDF. I don’t want to see written things; what I want to see is the Misano bike, because that will be, at 95 per cent, the one that will run in 2024.Interestingly it’s Yamaha’s struggles that are more illustrative of the challenges both it and Honda are facing.It’s not enough to simply say that they’ve fallen behind in the aerodynamics race, though this is true. It’s an all-of-bike concept problem that needs to be addressed.
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