Marc Marquez was expected to have an explosive 2024, yet his first year as a Ducati rider is anything but simple. The eight-time world champion is having trouble with a GP23 that seems difficult to interpret (not only for him) and that is struggling to be ridden in the top positions. To stay ahead he has to take risks, but gambling doesn’t always pay off… And he experienced it first-hand (also) at Silverstone, where he slipped in the Sprint.
After a complicated Friday, made positive only by qualifying directly to Q2, the Gresini rider started from seventh position on the starting grid and had set himself the goal of being in the top five. Mission accomplished, at least in the first laps of the short race of the British Grand Prix.
With a few laps to go, Marquez lost the front, sliding when he was fifth and throwing away what could have been a good race. Despite a new zero, the rider from Cervera found a reason to smile: “It was a good day, two laps made us smile. I prefer to finish with these feelings than suffer like I did all weekend. It’s a question of time and laps, we are adapting the bike to what I asked for my style and we have slowly gotten closer”.
“In the race we were close to the goal, which was to be fifth. There are other riders who are fast and will be tomorrow too. However, to achieve this goal, we had to take a risk and put a hard tyre on the front. But when I rode alone, the temperature started to drop, in addition to some mistakes on my part. Then the hard tyre gives you more grip, but at the same time it doesn’t warn you because it is more stable, so I lost the front”, explained Marc. The tyres were crucial in this Sprint, which was run with lower temperatures than expected and put the riders in difficulty on the choice of compound.
With this new zero, Marc slips to fourth place in the championship, overtaken by Enea Bastianini, today’s winner. However, the standings are not the focus of the eight-time world champion, who insists that he does not feel he is fighting for the world championship: “I have said it many times. Unrealistic expectations mean frustration. You don’t believe me? Keep fooling yourself, I already said in Holland and Germany that we are not fighting for the world championship”.
“You have to be consistent and fast. Maybe we were a little more consistent, especially on Sunday, but not fast. And that’s not how you win the world championship. There are points, but we are not ready to fight for the title when we come from four races in which they take 5 or 6 seconds from us at the end of the race,” explained the Cervera rider, who currently does not feel at the same level as those who are fighting for the title.
And yet, until the French Grand Prix it seemed that Marquez could not be excluded from the fight for the world championship. What has changed since Le Mans? “The trend that has been there in recent years has changed. Ducati starts and improves during the season. Maybe at the beginning the bike was better than the previous year. But I don’t know… Maybe, who knows, maybe… I, with what I have, I know that if I were perfect I could win. I’m trying to work in the best way, but there are riders who are faster than me. Am I the problem? Maybe, you never know,” he said.
Race by race, day by day. This is Marquez’s attitude, who doesn’t look ahead but prefers to focus on finding the sensations and feeling comfortable with the Desmosedici. However, he doesn’t hold back in the race and we saw him in a brawl with Pedro Acosta and Brad Binder, who were also involved in a battle with contact a few corners earlier.
Franco Morbidelli and Marco Bezzecchi fared even worse, and Marc offered his take on the two events: “I always say, what happened to Morbidelli at the first corner is completely normal. If you ride a MotoGP bike, you know what happens at the first corner, it’s very easy to understand what happened. We all braked really hard to release the brake lever. One brakes, another one brakes and the last ones have to brake even harder. The fight with Acosta and Binder? One went wide, the other one insisted and they touched.”
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