Pol Espargaró dazzled with a race at the start of the season in Qatar, where he led almost every lap until the tire gave out and he was overtaken by Enea Bastianini and Brad Binder, to end up with a podium finish.
Since then, for various reasons, things have not turned out as the youngest of the Granollers brothers expected, and in Austin he was affected by a virus that left him without strength.
From that race, Marc Márquez concluded that the new 2022 bike had a problem and that Honda had to get to work on it immediately.
Motorsport.com asked Pol Espargaró if he had also identified that problem and to what extent it had affected him.
“We don’t share problems because Marc has a very different driving style and he has some needs and I have others,” he explained.
“His problem lies more in the front end, which pushes a little more because of the extra grip we have this year, and it suffers a little more. I really don’t notice any problem, I’m happy with the bike we have and it’s just a matter of put the pieces together and have a good weekend, calm and without external problems. We just have to show that we are fast, as we already did in Qatar or in Argentina”, he said.
However, this Thursday, Alex Márquez, a Honda rider in the LCR team, explained that there were two lines of work at Honda. On the one hand, one with Pol and Takaaki Nakagami, and the other with the Márquez brothers.
“Honda is not working on two lines of development, at least as far as I know. Also, my riding style is very different from Nakagami, I think he is the smoothest and finest Honda rider, he is not like me, at On the contrary, when there is a lot of grip and the bike is nervous, Taka is the one who suffers the most and goes slower. On the other hand, with worn rubber and the worn track, in FP4 and Warm Up, he is usually the fastest”.
“The four Honda riders are very different in terms of riding style, but I don’t think that’s a problem or that we have to do different ways of working, each rider adapts in his own way”, proposes the Catalan.
What is clear is that the front end of the new Honda is one of the weak points detected by Marc Márquez, another view that Espargaró does not share.
“I don’t have problems with the front end, I’ve heard Alex complain a bit, not Marc, but I understand that the two more or less go along the same lines, but I understand that when a bike is fast and has potential you should enjoy it with the characteristics that it has, a motorcycle is never perfect, it always has positive and negative parts and the rider who makes the best use of the former is the one who goes faster, that is how Marc [Márquez] has always done it. I am happy with the package technical we have, but if they improve the front end, the better”.
“There is no problem with the bike, you don’t have to create it from scratch. In Qatar we saw that the bike is very fast and competitive, there we made a mistake with the tires”, which prevented him from achieving victory.
