Especially since Marc Márquez’s serious injury in 2020, Honda has experienced a sharp decline in competitiveness in MotoGP. The six-time champion of the premier class was the central figure of the project, the only one capable of regularly winning with the RC213V. However, even he couldn’t help the manufacturer bounce back until the end of 2023.
Despite the situation worsening in recent years, there were already signs that it could happen, with a bike whose development was focused on a single rider. Livio Suppo was the team manager of Honda until the end of 2017 and told Crash.net that the bike was already causing complaints at his time: ‘You will remember some interviews with Cal [Crutchlow], where he wasn’t that nice about the bike! But Dani [Pedrosa] also complained – not in public, but in technical meetings – that the bike was becoming increasingly difficult to ride’.
In any case, Márquez’s successive victories disguised these difficulties of his teammate, and the Italian admitted that Honda made a mistake for a long time and realized it too late: ‘Of course, Marc Márquez’s talent was a big help. And probably one of the mistakes was that, at the time, Honda didn’t listen to riders like Cal or Dani. They didn’t care much about the results of other riders; they were only focused on Marc winning, winning, winning. And probably, that was the biggest mistake. And then when they realized, which basically happened with Marc’s accident, it was too late. That’s why I don’t think Jerez 2020 was the main reason Honda had so many difficulties in recent years. It’s a combination of things’.