After the announcement of Marc Marquez’s departure from Honda and his arrival at Gresini, the eight-time world champion explained in an interview that before making his final decision he had a conversation with his former teammate Dani Pedrosa team.
Marquez did not want to reveal what they had talked about or what the current KTM test rider’s advice had been, leaving it up to Dani to explain the conversation if he deemed it appropriate. This weekend Pedrosa will be the commentator for DAZN, which has the rights to MotoGP in Spain. At the start of Friday practice for the Australian Grand Prix, he was asked what they talked about in that now famous phone call with Márquez.
After specifying that the content of this conversation was confidential, Dani admitted that “it was a surprise to me, he texted me and asked if we could talk. We chatted for a while, as he told me, from rider to rider. We exchanged some feelings. At that moment he was making a very crucial decision for his racing career and, I don’t know, he needed a chat, some help, an exchange of opinions”, he said. explained. “It’s also a bit of a compromising position for me, because I’m at KTM. I haven’t told him at any point that you have to do this or that, the decision is completely up to him.”
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
Marc Marquez, Repsol Honda Team
Naturally, Pedrosa did not want to reveal the contents of a private conversation between the two riders, even though Marc had authorized him to do so. “Let’s see, we talk about things, but they are private things, they touch on important issues and should not be revealed. In this context you have to keep things private because there are very important details. He was in a very compromising situation and he needed to have an opinion , perhaps, from a pilot’s point of view. The truth is, when I hung up the phone and I didn’t know or have any indication what decision he was going to make,” after the conversation.
Despite the call, Pedrosa was one of those who thought that Márquez would end his contract with Honda: “I thought he would continue, but there are many clues that suggest that he would leave, when you see his results and that in these years nothing works, the fatigue of not being able to get out of there tells you that it will certainly change, that it cannot go on like this for another year. But it is also true that he has a contract, which weighs a lot, which has been with that team for many years, with the sponsor Repsol who supported the team a lot and him, these are very important things to break such an important contract. Even his technical team, in the end we saw that he had to leave practically alone and this , for him, it was a very important aspect”, said Pedrosa without revealing too many confidences.
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