How the movie has changed for Honda, and for the worse, in such a short time. Alberto Puig’s “we’re back” after the inaugural event in Qatar, when Marc Márquez publicly assumed that they are no longer ready to fight for the title Pol Espargaró’s despair after the Le Mans fiasco, for not understanding that the new RC213V was a good motorcycle and suitable for all audiences to one like the current one with which it is impossible to overtake rivals.
“This Honda doesn’t overtake. The starts have to be very good, because for me at least it is very difficult for me to overtake. There was no way to overtake the two KTMs and I had to make up for lost time on the brakes, more then try to get inside the curve. I lost in three or four laps, trying to overtake four times, a second and a half, just because I was going too far and I wasn’t capable. Normally I go well and here I have gone wrong and I have not been able to recover positions, which has penalized me a lot,” said Pol, visibly frustrated after finishing eleventh at Le Mans.
When asked to explain the problems with his motorcycle, he did so precisely: “The first problem is that I can’t accelerate fast, with what they take you a little distance but just enough so that you can not stop later than them. Then when I have to stop, we have the problem that the bike doesn’t stop properly, because the rear axle locks up very quickly, we ask a lot of the front tire, we exceed its limit and it starts to lock up. If you add to that the high temperature and behind someone, it becomes very, very complicated. In Jerez I stayed behind the two KTMs and here too, hoping they would make a mistake. When Oliveira has committed it, he fell and I almost ate his motorcycle, with which I have lost two positions and a lot of time”.
And when asked how it is possible that the new Honda seemed like the ultimate weapon in winter testing and is now an ordeal for its riders, he says: “I don’t know how to answer. It didn’t seem like it, it was. That’s the thing. The bike was going well, the times came out, in rhythm, with used tires, reused, with new tires, at one lap, at two laps, at ten laps, at twenty laps, at race distance. In Malaysia, if not the fastest paced, almost, and in Indonesia, more of the same. There, in addition, I was the fastest in one lap. The bike didn’t look fast, it was fast. What happened? At that point we are. We do not understand. The grip has dropped a lot and this bike is not generating the grip that we expected to put more weight and more traction in the rear. We are suffering because it has a lot of weight in the rear to try to generate more gripbut it is not generating it and that causes us other added problems. Neither I as a pilot nor the engineers as engineers understand the situation. It’s complicated”.
And to all these problems of Pol adds the instability of Not knowing what your future will be if Honda will bet on renewing him or signing Mir, having the alternative of returning to KTM, where things are not going particularly well this year precisely…