The first race of the season is looming and by now almost all the teams on the MotoGP grid have unveiled their 2023 colours. This morning it was the turn of Honda LCR, which presented its RC213V with two different videos, given that the two sides of the boxes will have different main sponsors and colors.
Newcomer Alex Rins opened the dance, showing off the Castrol and Givi livery at the end of a very amusing video, in which he dreamed of being the one to assemble his MotoGP bike.
In his seventh season in the premier class, the Spanish rider found himself forced to make a change after racing for six years always with Suzuki, which abruptly concluded its program in the premier class, but Lucio Cecchinello was very good at seizing a of the most tempting opportunities that the riders’ market offered to try and redeem a two-year period that undoubtedly fell short of expectations with Alex Marquez.
In fact, the Italian manager has secured a highly experienced rider, who has already shown that he can win in MotoGP with his 5 successes, two of which came right in the final part of 2022. But it is also a blow for Honda important, because Rins will have an RC213V in the 2023 version and in this way he can be invaluable by supporting the two official riders Marc Marquez and Joan Mir in development.
The first tests weren’t easy, but this was the case for all the Honda riders, struggling with a bike that is not yet capable of battling on equal terms with the Ducati and in any case seems to be behind the competition. With Rins, however, the LCR team will certainly find a rider who can allow them to aspire to try and rediscover those successes that he had been able to seize with Cal Crutchlow between 2016 and 2018.
Motorcycle of Takaaki Nakagami, LCR Honda
Photo by: Team LCR
On the other side of the box, the one branded Idemitsu, there will still be Takaaki Nakagami, who is preparing to face his sixth season in the Japanese company’s satellite team, even if in a certain sense we could almost speak of him as a miracle worker.
It is no mystery, in fact, that in the second half of 2022 Honda had decided to do without him in its line-up for 2023, with the intention of allocating him to the development of the RC213V, thus placing him alongside the other test rider Stefan Bradl within the test team.
However, Taka has to thank the hesitations of Ai Ogura, who gave up the chance to make the leap to the premier class, preferring to give himself another year in Moto2. In this way, he gave his compatriot another opportunity to go in search of that podium that he has only missed on a couple of occasions in his career and perhaps give an encore to the pole position conquered in Aragon in 2020.
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