Marc Marquez has played down the notion the Honda RC213V is designed specifically in his favour, despite using a different frame to his stablemates.
Honda has come in for scrutiny over the years for its apparent preference in developing the RC213V around the needs of its talisman Marquez, who has a particular riding style that is active and requires emphasis of placing load on the front-end.
It’s an approach that can be attributed to him winning six MotoGP World Championships, but after Honda began to go the wrong way on development in the winter of 2019/2020, Marquez then got injured at the start of the season leaving it without a reference point.
Ironically, on his return to action this year Marquez has found the RC213V even less to his liking and has struggled to find the same performance, while he has been involved in a series of crashes, including two at Motorland Aragon this weekend already.
This is despite Marquez running a different bike to his team-mates, raising further questions about whether Honda is right in focusing all of its attentions on one rider. However, the man himself insists the frame is available to the other Honda riders if they want it.
“In Assen I received a new chassis and again in Austria, in Aragon I have another updated one, but I cannot say more,” he told GPOne.com.
“It improves the stability of the bike in the fast corners, even if I find myself suffering more in the slow ones. The other Honda riders are using another frame, when they try mine sometimes they feel better sometimes they don’t. There is a bit of confusion, but on my side the ideas are clear.”
The reasons why Honda has lost its way in MotoGP
It has been a trying couple of years for Honda, who learned in 2019 with Jorge Lorenzo it was perhaps not prudent to focus all of its attentions on Marquez in case he got injured.
That led to the signing of Pol Espargaro for 2021, but of course Marquez was injured in 2020.
With the 2020-spec Honda RC213V already a troubled evolution based on testing, Marquez’s exit just emphasised the problem when the remaining trio on the spec bike - Alex Marquez, Stefan Bradl, Cal Crutchlow - struggled for form.
The fact Takaaki Nakagami on a year-old bike proved consistently competitive is certainly very telling.
If anything, the whole situation serves to highlight one factor few perhaps would have thought in hindsight - the impact of losing Dani Pedrosa.
The 2020 Honda RC213V would have been the first bike not designed around his invaluable input and given his diminutive frame is on a par with Marquez, you can imagine he was well placed to put in the hours to help his fellow Spaniard win his titles.
What is most concerning for Honda will be the increasing frequency with which Marquez especially is crashing - almost every weekend - and for a rider that has now shown he doesn’t always bounce back from them, it has some serious head scratching to do ahead of 2022.
