Marc Marquez has described the enormous accident he suffered during morning warm-up for the Indonesian MotoGP as ‘one of the biggest’ of his career.
The Spaniard was ruled out of the second race of the 2022 MotoGP season after suffering a concussion but otherwise escaped serious injury in the spectacular high-side at the fast Turn 7 right-hander.
A weekend to forget for the six-time World Champion after also crashing once in free practice and twice in Q1, he saved the biggest for last when the rear of his Honda RC213V slid out before gripping again to fling Marquez airborne.
Thumping the asphalt upon landing, a frustrated Marquez had little to say about a dismal weekend but counted himself lucky to have been more seriously hurt.
“What can I say? It has not been our weekend, we have struggled and had problems from the start,"
"It was a really big crash in warm-up this morning, maybe one of the biggest I have had.
"I went to the local hospital and while there were no serious problems - it was decided that I should not race.
"It’s of course a shame, but the best decision.”
The crashes overshadowing Marquez’s MotoGP star
Watching Marquez pick himself up off the ground in Indonesia, you can’t help but consider how much has changed since the conclusion of the 2019 MotoGP season when it was hard to imagine anyone stopping his relentlessly dominant form.
In the end, Marquez stopped himself with his costly accident in the 2020 Spanish MotoGP in Jerez prompting a long period of recovery, a road he continued to traverse upon a tentative racing comeback in 2021.
While enough of the scintillating speed is seemingly still there, Marquez’s looseness and worrying frequency of accidents - he was second on the ‘crash’ list for 2021 despite skipping four events - indicates a worrying lack of feeling on the Repsol Honda.
Indeed, Marquez has regularly featured in the upper portion of that falls ranking, a curious note when you consider his ubiquitous dominance during the period between 2015 and 2019.
A (mad) method of pushing beyond the limit before dialling it back to something just below it has been Marquez’s trademark ever since his debut, subsequently leading to a number of huge accidents, from which he has generally bounced back from.
However, one can tell Marquez is chasing a similar strategy without the necessary confidence or tactile touch, which coupled with the RC213V’s tendency to get tail-happy when pushed, explains his huge crashes in Jerez, Assen and Silverstone last year.
With his Mandalika crash bearing some similarities to that of Buriram in 2019 and considering the stress his body has been under the last couple of years, Marquez might well be waking up this morning feeling battered, bruised and wondering whether it is all worth it…
