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Honda’s MotoGP spearhead Marc Marquez kept his cards close to his chest, but still painted a fairly informative picture with his words after his first day of testing in 2023.
Marquez was 12th-fastest, the best of the Honda riders but a second off the pace, on the opening day of the three-day Sepang test.
But Friday laptimes are unlikely to have been particularly informative for the season ahead, and he acknowledged he was largely “in cruise mode” to ensure he can focus on what needed testing without committing a needless error.
And Marquez did say he had a “positive day”, which should represent a welcome change of pace from the post-season test day at Valencia last November, in which his disappointment at the developments made available by Honda was barely concealed.
Except, the source of his positivity? It is not necessarily bike-related.
“For me today the most positive thing is about physical condition I feel very good, I started to play with the bike, I started to ride well,” said Marquez.
“It’s true that still all the riders are in the pre-season and tomorrow we will feel a drop [in energy] and the third day we will feel a drop, but this is normal for everybody. But I feel like we are in a normal shape.
“I don’t feel any limitations, and this was the most important in that first day. Because all this winter I worked for that.
“I said already in Valencia, I will work on myself, Honda will work on the machine. And on myself, we are doing a great job because I feel much better.”
Marquez’s arm hadn’t healed correctly after his Jerez 2020 fracture, and he had to sacrifice much of last season to get it fixed – but that surgery continues to pay dividends, with the six-time MotoGP champion increasingly convinced he’s back to normality.
But it was the Honda RC213V, not his physical condition, that was the main source of angst late last year, and Marquez has made it clear at Sepang that he has not yet seen a major improvement.
He had three prototypes available to him, after starting out the test with an installation run of sorts on the 2022 bike.
He described those prototypes as “quite similar tone to the other”, though for one of them – with a revised fairing “the character is a bit different, but the laptime was more or less similar”.
“Now they need to analyse – of course I was able to ride in a different way but more or less the performance was the same.”
Overall, the feeling was “more or less like Valencia” because it was “more or less the same bike”.
The good thing is, Marquez indicated this was what Honda had already told him to expect, when asked by The Race: “I mean, it was a bit on the plan. It was what they said to me.
“Of course you always want more, more and more, and you always want to be faster and faster. But was already what they told me. That we will do step by step.
“So, you can evaluate the pre-season in the last day, in Portimao.
“Now it’s too early, because still I have many things to try. It’s what I say, we will not find half a second from one bike to the other one. We need to be step by step closer to the top guys.”
“We are still far from the top riders,” he acknowledged in another answer, while also using similar words in a separate interview with MotoGP.com.
This is, obviously, not so encouraging. And Marquez appeared relatively subdued, or at least reserved, through his media commitments, even though that could also be explained by the preceding, no doubt fatiguing, 58 laps of mileage.
All throughout, Marquez was keen to emphasise that a proper assessment could only be made at the end of the second test, on March 11-12 at Portimao. He also mentioned that he still had another prototype to try at Sepang, and that “especially in Portimao I think will arrive something new”.
So, when asked whether the bike was still not at the level of title contention – like he said in Valencia – Marquez side-stepped the question.
“I will not answer, because I will answer this question in the last day of the Portimao test.
“We’ve just tested one day, we have more things to try, we have more ideas, and in the [testing] schedule still we haven’t arrived even in the middle, at the half. So yeah, let’s see.”
But, combined with the comments about his fitness, the underlying implication is clear. Marquez feels ready to be right in the mix of a title fight again, and it’s up to Honda to hold up its end of the bargain – and to do that it still needs to improve, presumably sooner rather than later.
