MotoGP | Marquez: “Without yesterday’s crash, maybe the podium was possible”

One of the biggest surprises of this first half of the MotoGP season is Marc Marquez’s fasting wins. Since his arrival in Ducati, everyone expected to see the eight-time world champion return to the top step of the podium, yet he leaves Silverstone fourth in the championship, 62 points behind the new leader Jorge Martin.

Still without a win, the Gresini rider turned around one of his most difficult weekends of the season by coming from seventh on the grid to secure a fourth place. In a tricky British Grand Prix with cold temperatures that tested tyre management, Marquez managed to get what he believes was the maximum.

Sunday’s fifth position redeems the zero on Saturday, when he slipped in the Sprint which inevitably affected the rest of the weekend: “Without the crash on Saturday, perhaps a podium would have been possible… Or maybe another crash. When I passed Aleix, I did two laps to have a bit of a margin, but I was looking more at the riders behind me than at Pecco. But for my mentality, I didn’t want to risk two mistakes in the same weekend. I preferred to save and go to Austria with confidence, rather than risk crashing again. Today I had to use my head more than my heart.”

“The weekend was resolved with work and persistence,” explained the eight-time world champion, who changed the face of a Grand Prix that began perhaps in the worst possible way. “When you start badly on Friday, you’re already late. Even in the warmup, where you usually don’t try anything, we tried some great things that helped us for the race. For me, the most important thing is that I managed to keep up with the pace of those in front, I was surprised myself. We were there for six laps, then the tire started to drop. I have the feeling that I could have done more.”

Hard work always pays off, Marquez is convinced, and he expresses gratitude towards the team: “This weekend I had the worst Friday, but I saved everything little by little, also with the team that did a great job. Today I managed to be close to Pecco, who suffered. But Bastianini and Martin still have the GP24 that takes those 3 or 4 seconds at the end of the race. This weekend I had a handicap, which was the corner entry. Once that was fixed, it was fixed the whole weekend and I was able to at least ride and be consistent”.

However, this is not enough because the GP23 pays for a technical gap that is too big from the updated version: “Watching the riders with the GP24 helps a bit to see what they do better or worse. But in terms of set-up, you have to look at the GP23 because the GP24 has a slightly different concept. But we try to follow our path because I have a slightly particular style and I’m slowly adapting it to the Ducati”.

One of the riders who has the GP24 is Enea Bastianini, winner yesterday and again today. Author of a double, the official Ducati rider has definitively overtaken Marc in the riders’ standings, placing himself in third position: “Enea is a rider with a lot of talent and it showed. He is pure talent. His ability is that he turns with very little angle, leans little and this is difficult to do, because usually when you lean little you have less speed, instead he manages to do this while maintaining the same speed. If he manages to solve the qualification, he will start winning races again. He is always the fastest rider in the final laps. I absolutely put him in the fight for the title, you have always put me in the fight, now he is third in front of me, so he is definitely in the fight”.