~ Auto Buzz ~: What’s Up With Marc Marquez? Is there a crisis at HRC? No, says HRC’s Shuhei Nakamoto.

The Honda rider started the 2015 season as the man to beat. After six races, though, he is 5th in the MotoGP World Championship, 49 points behind the Yamaha’s Valentino Rossi. Crisis? “I’m still the same Marc Marquez,” insisted the reigning World Champion. “If you don’t risk, you don’t win.” Engines come first. This has always been Honda’s philosophy. “If you have power, you can tune the engine. But if you don’t have power, you can’t do anything,” said HRC’s Shuhei Nakamoto at Mugello, specifically in regard to the problems that Marquez is having this season. Beginning at the Spanish GP at Jerez, Marc has complained that the engine of the 2015 Honda RC213V is too aggressive. He says he cannot control the bike as well as he used to do. The bike is moving and sliding too much. The bike becomes physically demanding and the Honda riders struggle entering corners. “Marc complains about an aggressive engine,” said Nakamoto, the HRC Vice President. “This means that the torque or the engine power are more than what he wants. As we cannot touch the engine, we need to work on the electronics and the chassis. But we can work on it. On the contrary, if Marc was asking for more power, it would have been impossible to support him in this request, as the engines are frozen.”

Last year, Marquez was practically unbeatable—the number 93 Honda dominated the 2014 MotoGP season with 13 wins out of 18 races. As such, he started 2015 as the man to beat. But things haven’t gone as expected, leading Valentino Rossi to say this: “The real surprise [of 2015] is not the competitiveness of Ducati, but to see Marc 5th in the championship.” “Crisis? No,” said HRC’s Nakamoto firmly. “In terms of results, they are not as good as I expected. This year, we have had some unlucky things due to the weather, the timing, etc. Le Mans race weekend is a good example. Marc was so strong in the warmup, but in the afternoon the temperature was completely different. Marc usually prefers the harder front tire, but we couldn’t test it due to the weather conditions. “We need to change the machine setup a bit. We are now too much concentrated on the braking area. We need to change this and focus more on the corner performance. Last year, Marc’s braking was very, very strong. This year, it’s even stronger, so we don’t need to concentrate on this aspect.” In Japan and at the track, Honda’s factory team is working hard to solve this problem, and Marquez knows it. HRC brought a new swingarm to Mugello, as well as the chassis that Marquez had rejected in the Malaysia pre-season test. The team is also working hard on the electronics.

The race weekend at Mugello was more frustration for Marquez: “I treated the practices as if we were working on a test day. We were so focused on working on the electronics to try to make the engine smoother that we didn’t put a new tire on to pass directly into QP2. Then I crashed in FP4 and in the QP1, we used only one soft tire to save two for the Q2.” “We made some mistakes. Starting from the 13th spot on the grid, we were focusing on recovering positions from the start, and we made it. I was 3rd on the second lap and 2nd on the third lap behind Lorenzo. I was surprised to stay with Lorenzo. Then, in the second part of the race, I started to struggle a lot. I tried to keep the same pace as the Ducatis, but I was going over the limit in all the corners, so it was easy to make a mistake. “Compared to Le Mans, at Mugello I was more confident with the front, but I was riding only with the front wheel. On lap 7-8, when the tires drop, I was sliding a lot in the corner entry without any support of the rear, so when you ride like this for 20 laps it’s easy to make a mistake. In the end, with six laps to go, it was my mistake, I went a bit wide, the front closed and I crashed.

Marc Marquez pushing wide on the racetrack

“Last year I was sliding, but I was always feeling the rear wheel. This year, on the contrary, what was a strong point has turned into a weakness. The bike is sliding a lot in the corner entry and you can stop the bike only on the front wheel. This means that we push throughout the whole race on the front tire. We stress the tires a lot and we suffer in the last part of the race. “It’s a problem we will not fix from one race to another, but we will fix it. For me, it’s more the engine character. This weekend, we fixed the exit of the corner but now we are working on the entry. We realized this problem already in November in Valencia. The Malaysian heat minimized the issue, so the problem was maybe underestimated.” Looking at the current 2015 MotoGP championship, Marquez has scored one win and one 2nd place in Spain but the two zeros due to crashes in Argentina and Italy has hurt his position in the standings. After six races, Marquez is 5th with 69 points, 49 behind leader Valentino Rossi.

“Looking at the championship, leaving Mugello with zero points makes things more complicated,” said Marquez, especially looking at how strong the Yamahas are.” What about riding more conservatively with an eye toward the championship? “I have always pushed 100 percent” said Marquez said firmly. “It’s frustrating to see how Jorge Lorenzo was going away, but I have always faced races giving my maximum. If I hadn’t taken some risks, I wouldn’t have been able to be 2nd on lap 3. If you don’t risk, you don’t win.” Is there a crisis? “It’s clear that we are suffering and we are struggling more than last year,” said Marquez. “But in the end, we have the speed. We know that we have a problem when the tires drop as I don’t have the support from the rear tire and we are working on it with the same determination. It’s the priority.”