“Márquez on a Ducati? It will be an awesome combination in 2024”
MOTORCYCLES
Many MotoGP fans were dubious about Marc Márquez’s switch from factory Honda rider to independent-team Ducati rider for 2024. The six-times MotoGP king hasn’t won the title since 2019, struggling through the last four seasons with a right-arm injury sustained at the start of the 2020 MotoGP championship. He’s past his best, said the doubters.
Four operations followed, including a humeral osteotomy, which involved surgeons cutting the humerus in two, rotating the lower part 30 degrees and plating it back together.
Surely Márquez was done? Surely even his fiery determination would be quenched by something as gruesome as that?
And yet no one in the MotoGP paddock had any doubts. Those in the know don’t judge riders entirely by results. They see the struggles they’re going through – on and off their motorcycles – and see beyond the results.
Márquez won six titles with Honda in seven seasons, even though the company’s RC213V was never the best bike on the grid. That’s why he was always a sight to behold – pushing like hell, flirting with disaster at every corner, overriding the bike to get the results he wanted. In fact, the results he needed. Márquez lives for crushing his rivals.
That spectacular modus operandi ceased to be enough during the past few seasons, due to the vast strides made by Ducati and MotoGP’s other European manufacturers, who have transformed the championship with new-wave technology inspired by Formula 1: downforce aerodynamics, tuned mass dampers and ride-height adjusters.
During the 2023 MotoGP season Márquez crashed more than ever – 29 tumbles during the 20-round season, essentially because he was racing a bike against two-wheeled F1 cars.
Thus the sense of anticipation when he climbed aboard a Gresini Ducati Desmosedici for the first time during November’s first postseason tests was immense.
In cool, tricky conditions at Valencia it took the 30-year-old Spaniard just 42 laps to be the fastest man on track. He ended the day fourth quickest, 0.17sec off the top, with a lap time 0.15sec slower than the best qualifying lap he had managed with his RC213V at the previous weekend’s season finale at the track. And he looked like he was hardly trying – his bull-in-a-china-shop antics already a thing of the past.
The Ducati is a longer, lower motorcycle, which makes it easier to control. The marque’s current number one, ‘Pecco’ Bagn
