Last week’s Valencia tests gave us our first taste of the 2024 MotoGP season, but all eyes were on Marc Marquez, making his debut with Ducati. The eight-time world champion climbed aboard the Gresini team’s Desmosedici for the first time, whose colors he will wear. A leap into the unknown for the Spaniard, who after 11 seasons and six titles (MotoGP only) with Honda gets on what is in fact the bike to beat.
Test yourself to win again. “If I don’t win, I will understand that my role has changed,” Marc Marquez himself revealed to us in an exclusive interview released a few weeks ago. However, many think that the rider from Cervera could return to being a tough nut to crack for everyone next year. Among these is Jorge Lorenzo, who went out of his way to the Spanish newspaper AS, claiming that he might also be able to fight for the world championship.
“It won’t be easy, but if I had to bet, I’d bet on him. Not for the victories, but precisely for the championship,” said the five-time MotoGP world champion. “I think the fact of finding himself with riders who know Ducati and are younger than him will complicate things a bit for him. If he doesn’t have bad luck, just look at what his brother Alex did. Even though he has grown a lot in MotoGP and has approached Marc’s level, he doesn’t have the same magic or talent as his brother. If Alex was able to do what we saw this year, why wouldn’t Marc be able to win more races?”
Photo by: Dorna
Marc Marquez, Gresini Racing
Lorenzo, currently a commentator on the MotoGP for DAZN Spain, looks not only at the technical aspect but also that of the entertainment: “For Marc, for the sport and for the entertainment, it’s spectacular. But he had to renounce a contract that has not been seen and, certainly, will not be seen in the history of MotoGP. Four years and everything that came with it economically.”
However, the rider’s spirit also leads him to reflect on the current championship, dominated by the Ducatis. The current Desmosedici is the “daughter” of Gigi Dall’Igna, who Jorge knows well from his past in Aprilia first and then in Ducati: “Eight winning Ducatis? Sooner or later it had to happen, because Dall’Igna is an engineer who has always achieved what he set out to do. He succeeded when he worked for Aprilia in 125cc, 250cc and when he moved to Superbike with Noale. He always brought out the best bike.”
“I needed new stimuli (when in 2016 he signed with Ducati for the 2017 and 2018 seasons, ed), working with new people and a different bike. I chose to move to Ducati because I knew that sooner or later Gigi would come up with the best bike. Unfortunately, he succeeded too late. I would have liked to win the race at Mugello (in 2018, ed) a few weeks or months earlier, because it would have changed my career a lot. But in the end Dall’Igna managed to become world champion”, continues Lorenzo.
Precisely in 2018, when he was a Ducati rider, the five-time world champion had started to get into gear and that season he achieved three successes (Mugello, Barcellona and Red Bull Ring). However, he decided to move to Honda for the following year, which then became the last of his career. What would have happened if Lorenzo had remained in Ducati? And what would he have been able to do with the current Desmosedici? It’s difficult to find the answers to these questions: “Well, we already saw it in 2018 when Ducati gave me what I asked for to be comfortable and I was able to ride better. At the time it was a less complete Ducati than the current one, it wasn’t the best bike, but it was the fastest.”
![Andrea Dovizioso, Ducati Team, Gigi Dall'Igna, General Manager Ducati Team, Jorge Lorenzo, Ducati Team](https://cdn-6.motorsport.com/images/mgl/YBr7mxvY/s1000/motogp-italian-gp-2018-andrea-dovizioso-ducati-team-gigi-dall-igna-ducati-team-general-man.jpg)
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
Andrea Dovizioso, Ducati Team, Gigi Dall’Igna, General Manager Ducati Team, Jorge Lorenzo, Ducati Team
“I managed to win three of the five or six races that Ducati won. Furthermore, in 2020 without Marc Marquez on the track due to injury, it probably would have been easier to win the world championship. But I don’t even want to hypothesize about things we will never know. What I have demonstrated remains: with work and consistency I managed to go fast with different bikes. It wasn’t the case with Honda, because I got injured in Assen, but I think I would have won with them too if I hadn’t hurt myself. But again, that’s just speculation.”
Honda itself is experiencing one of its worst moments. The demonstration is precisely the farewell of Marc Marquez, who to return to winning chose to change bikes after trying to revive the situation in HRC. Is a figure like Gigi Dall’Igna missing? According to Jorge Lorenzo, yes: “If Honda had taken Gigi two or three years ago, perhaps they would currently have a better bike and they wouldn’t have lost Marquez.”
But Marc has left and now it will be up to Joan Mir and Luca Marini to lead the project to return to the top: “If you lose patience, you sink into this situation and don’t get out of it. A lot of patience is needed, with the Japanese philosophy of kaizen (continuous improvement) and putting the pieces of the puzzle together to return to having a competitive motorbike-rider combination. But at the moment Ducati has the best bike and the best riders, so it will be complicated to beat them.”
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