We’ve only just ticked past the halfway mark of the 2023 MotoGP season, but this weekend’s San Marino Grand Prix will fire the starting gun on the 2024 campaign.
The post-race test on Monday will give teams their first chance to evaluate their 2024 prototype bikes — and give riders their first chance to decide if they like what they see.
For many this will be a formality. Bikes evolve year on year, particularly for those manufacturers at the front already pinching wins. Ducati will be aiming to keep up its momentum. KTM and Aprilia will be looking for the next level of refinement that might close the gap.
But for Honda and Yamaha the prospects are completely different.
For MotoGP’s two Japanese marques, this week’s one-day test is crucial.
HONDA HOPING TO END THE EXODUS
The rate at which Honda has sunk from can-do-no-wrong championship dominator with Marc Márquez in 2013–19 to a sad also-ran this year is alarming.
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.
The crux of the team’s woes isn’t simply that its 2023-spec RC213V is slow; it’s that the bike is dangerously unpredictable.
Rins is absent from the grid because the bike broke his leg. Márquez and factory teammate Joan Mir have finished only two races apiece, with the rest sacrificed to crashes or injuries.
It took a drastic change in approach for Márquez to see the chequered flag on a Sunday for the first time this season in Austria late last month.
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.
“It looks like a joke, but it’s true,” Márquez said, per Autosport, of his first finish for 2023 some five months into the season.
“Basically it’s easy to understand. You just approach the race in another mentality.”
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.
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It’s why Misano is so important. Just as he’s had to drastically adapt himself to meet the bike at its level, he’ll be looking for signs Honda is prepared to make similarly serious adaptations to meet his demands for improvement.
There are a great many reasons for the once great Honda has fallen off the pace. The company’s approach to motorsport generally, the way it manages research and development and Japan’s years-long Covid isolation, which made knowledge exchange with European engineers more difficult, have all played roles.
The bottom line, though, is that it’s been left behind in aerodynamic development, which increasingly dominates performance parameters in the premier class.
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.
But what must be evident is a change in Honda’s approach.
Márquez has reportedly made explicit his retention at the team is dependent on Honda diving into the market and poaching as many talented aerodynamicists and other engineers as possible to prove it’s serious about catching up. The fastest way to make up for lost years isn’t to stick to internal research and development, it’s to buy knowledge and incorporate it.
The problem, Autosport has reported, is that it took until the end of August to be convinced of the need to heed Márquez’s warning. By now it’s getting late to convince engineers to switch to the struggling giant, especially with rumours that both Márquez and Mir are looking for ways to exit the team.
There’s a lot of work to do in a short amount of time, and there are doubts Honda can get it done before it loses its star for good.
Rumours abounded in the Barcelona paddock at the weekend that the ground is being prepared for a switch to Gresini to partner brother Alex.
Spanish journalist Oriol Puigdemont has theorised that there can be no other reason for Gresini, which next year will field this season’s all-conquering Desmosedici, to have left Fabio di Giannantonio’s seat uncommitted — and for all the prospective Moto2 riders earmarked for it to have renewed their deals to stay in the intermediate class.
Perhaps Márquez has already made up his mind.
Van Gisbergen crashes out of enduro test | 01:12
YAMAHA GETS ITS ULTIMATUM
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.
But the team’s relative closeness to the leading pack only means that more should be expected from it.
That’s certainly Fabio Quartararo’s view, the Frenchman having had been hamstrung in last year’s title defence by a bike that was no match for Francesco Bagnaia’s Ducati.
He was convinced to re-sign for two more years by Yamaha’s plans to improve the bike, but despite some positive signs during late-season and off-season testing, this year has been even worse than 2022.
Now he’s fed up.
“In the Misano test I want to have proof,” he told Autosport. “Yamaha has been promising me things for three years in a 10-page PDF document, of which nine and a half pages are not fulfilled.
“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.
“There it will be seen if Yamaha really wants me for the future.”
Interestingly it’s Yamaha’s struggles that are more illustrative of the challenges both it and Honda are facing.
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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.
“I think that Ducati, KTM and Aprilia risk much more than the Japanese factories,” Quartararo told Autosport.
“The differences between the KTM, Ducati and Aprilia of five years ago compared to the current ones are huge.
“Our bike is the same. I saw my 2021 world championship bike and next to it was [Jorge] Lorenzo’s from 2015.
“They are practically the same; almost nothing has changed. That is very rare after six years.”
That’s perhaps why Quartararo is pessimistic he’s going to get what he wants from next week’s test.
“Of course I’m not fully confident [for next year],” he said. “I try to believe the maximum on next year’s bike, and it’s going to be super important to be patient and work hard until the beginning of next season.”
While Quartararo will still be stuck with Yamaha next year for better or worse, a poor showing in Misano would likely put him into what will be a chaotic silly season for 2025 seats, when almost the entire grid will be out of contract and his world championship credentials will surely hold sway.
THE MISANO GRAND PRIX
As the last race of the European season, Misano World Circuit will set the tone for the long run of flyaway races that ends the year, but the story of most significant interest will be the health of championship leader Francesco Bagnaia.
Bagnaia suffered a monster highside on the first lap of last weekend’s Catalan Grand Prix and was subsequently run over by Brad Binder.
The reigning champion was taken to hospital but was miraculously found to have escaped from the crash with nothing more serious than some extensive bruising.
“On Sunday night I went back home with the team, and after getting some rest I immediately started preparing to be ready to return to the track in Misano,” he said.
“The San Marino GP is always a special event for us Italian riders and especially for us Ducati riders. I will do my best to be able to race on Saturday and Sunday.”
He was declared fit at the track on Thursday, although that hasn’t historically correlated with peak fitness. But even if he’s hobbled in the race, you know he’ll be taking part.
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His championship lead is a very healthy 50 points — thanks to Aprilia’s sensational one-two in Barcelona that prevented Jorge Martin from closing the gap further — but a good weekend from his Spanish rival could theoretically slash that down to 13 points across the sprint and the grand prix.
Even a middling race to minor points could be crucial for Bagnaia’s title defence.
Fortunately he and Ducati know their way around here, having won the last two races at this circuit. The track’s long straights are built for Ducati horsepower, but with Aprilia also expected to go well and in an obviously rich vein of form, Martin likely won’t have things all his own way anyway.
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
Every practice, qualifying and race of the 2023 San Marino Grand Prix is live and ad-break free during racing on Kayo and Fox Sports.
First free practice is on Friday from 6:45pm (AEST), with timed practice for qualifying from 11:00pm.
The final free practice session starts on Saturday at 6:10pm ahead of qualifying at 6:50pm and the sprint race at 11pm.
The Sunday warm-up is at 5:40pm, with pre-race coverage following at 9:15pm ahead of lights-out for the San Marino Grand Prix at 10pm.