Honda is still looking for the best performance and Takaaki Nakagami is working on strategies to be more competitive, and to that end he admitted in Thailand that he was inspired by… Marc Marquez.
In his usual analysis of his race, the japanese LCR Honda rider admits he was disappointed with his result in the race, especially given his initial performance in sunday’s race, where he didn’t have such a competitive pace: ‘I had a good start but I couldn’t gain positions early on in the race, I was inside the pack. During the race I was behind Jack [Miller], and at the end of the second half of the race my pace wasn’t bad, in the top five or six, but at the start I was very slow and that cost me a lot of [places]. In the last corner I overtook Jack and Raul [Fernandez] and in the end I managed to score but I was disappointed because this weekend I had a very reasonable race pace, but at the beginning I wasn’t strong enough and I’m disappointed with the final result’.
Nakagami then went on to explain that he had been trying all weekend to work out a way to be faster… with Marc Marquez serving as his inspiration, leaving a warning for what’s to come:
– We’ve tried different strategies since free practice, always trying to follow someone, especially the Ducati for us to use the slipstream and gain one or even two tenths, and that really makes a lot of difference. The next race will be very important, with two long straights, and we’ll try the same strategy as Marc [Marquez] did: follow someone to try to get the best performance to get a lap time, to try to improve the grid position and have an easier life.