Honda continues to work to try to recover the (a lot) of ground that separates it from Ducati and the manufacturers that occupy the best positions in MotoGP. This weekend the HRC team will make available a new engine specification for the official RC213V of Luca Marini, Joan Mir and Takaaki Nakagami.
On paper, it was a move that should give the pilots hope, but both Marini and Mir immediately acted as firefighters, nipping expectations in the bud.
The new engine, in fact, is considered not high-performance enough to be able to change things in a short time. Marini, Mir and Nakagami will use the new specification at the Red Bull Ring, probably with some differences between them to understand which of the three could be the best one to continue its development.
“New engine is a very big word. I would call it a small update,” Luca Marini said bluntly.
Luca Marini, Repsol Honda Team
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
“In terms of performance we saw that at Silverstone Nakagami did slightly better, but we are not yet at the level of the other engines. Also the new specification seems to be more difficult to drive. We are getting closer to the other engines, but not enough yet.”
“Of course I thank those who made these updates. It’s part of the process and it’s important to keep pushing. Even small updates are something important. For this I can say I’m happy. For the rest we’ll see. What is certain is that the engine updates will not change our performance on the track”.
Joan Mir was more positive than his teammate, but still stressed that the new features will not transform the performance of the RC213Vs in an immediate and convincing way.
“This weekend we will have a different engine configuration. And that’s a good thing. But it’s not the configuration that you put on the bike and it’s immediately fast. It’s something that will take us time to understand, we will have to sort things out electronically and, maybe, also on the set-up.”
Joan Mir, Repsol Honda Team
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
“We’ll have to work on it a bit, but it’s nice to have something new to try and understand and whether or not it’s the right direction to go, whether it’s going to give us more speed or not. We’ll have to see.”
“It’s not about an engine that’s never been tried before. It’s about an engine configuration that’s never been tried before. It’s not about the engine, it’s about the configuration.”
“At the beginning of the season we understood that we were not on the right path, so we went back to take two steps forward in the direction we want. We do not expect it to be two steps forward. We just want to understand if the direction taken is the right one, the configuration that we will continue to use”, concluded Mir.
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