Honda's MotoGP woes: 'No feel, the bike doesn’t turn, no grip, no acceleration'
MotoGP
Honda had a horrible 2022 MotoGP season, so we asked Marc Márquez and Stefan Bradl to tell us what went wrong with the RC213V, while HRC’s MotoGP technical manager Takeo Yokoyama reveals his plans to fix the bike for 2023
Márquez battling with Jack Miller during October’s Malaysian GP at Sepang – the Ducati is much better planted than the Honda
Honda didn’t have its worst-ever MotoGP season last year but it very nearly did. Honda finished last in the constructors’ world championship for the first time, but in fact it had already finished last in 1979, 1980 and 1981, but because the fabulous-but-flawed oval-piston NR500 didn’t score any points the company name didn’t feature in the constructors’ championship results.
Honda has been in trouble since the start of 2020, when its number-one rider Marc Márquez got hurt and Michelin introduced its game-changing super-grippy rear slick. The loss of its ‘captain’ (as Honda calls Márquez) coinciding with the new tyre was a double whammy to development of the RC213V.
The issue is that Michelin’s rear slick has always been better than its front slick, so the new rear further increased the imbalance in grip, making it harder than ever to find the best balance of traction between the front and rear of the bike.
Márquez at Aragon last September, his first race since the fourth operation on the arm he broke at the start of the 2020 season
Red Bull
Márquez returned to action in 2021, won three races, then got hurt again, just as engineers were putting the finishing touches to a very different 2022 RC213V, designed to take advantage of the new rear slick.
The new machine put Márquez’s team-mate Pol Espargaró on the podium at the 2022 season-opening Qatar GP but it was another six months before the bike scored its second top-three result, when Márquez finished a close second at Phillip Island.
Honda has just completed its worst grand prix season since it raced the fabulous but flawed NR500 four-stroke in 1981. The company didn’t score a single MotoGP victory during 2022,…
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“I don’t have front feel, the bike doesn’t turn, then no grip, so no acceleration,” said Márquez last season. “The bike is better than the 2021 bike – the problem is that the others have improved even more.”
Honda MotoGP test rider Stefan Bradl, who raced in Márquez’s place on numerous occasions during 2020, 2021 and 2022, also struggled with the bike.
“Now you need to have an incredible balance between the front and the rear – and this is what’s missing,” said the former Moto2 world champion. “We have some strong points, like straight-line braking, but the bike isn’t in balance. The front turns but the rear doesn’t want to turn, so the whole bike doesn’t work together.
“Sometimes we have too much rear grip, sometimes not enough, so something is missing between the front and the rear tyres that would bring us smooth riding. At the moment we always have to fight to get what we want – braking, turning and so on – which makes riding very hard and inconsistent. And because things aren’t smooth and working together it’s easy to make mistakes.”
This explains the numerous crashes experienced by Márquez, Bradl and other RC213V riders last season.
A rare high point in 2022 – Márquez battles for victory with winner Alex Rins at Phillip Island, where the track’s wide, open curves hid most of the RC213V’s problems
Red Bull
“We have to question everything to understand everything,” Bradl added. “Obviously the problem isn’t only the bike, it’s also communication – we’re losing a lot of time communicating with Japan.”
By the time Márquez returned from a fourth surgery on his broken arm in September, Honda was trying hard to fix the problems, delivering a revised chassis, new downforce aero and other parts.
“We are taking risks, trying things, trying to understand the direction for future,” he said at the time. “In some areas the 2022 bike is better, in other areas we’ve lost a lot, so we need to understand the way to ride faster and especially more consistently.
“The character of the bike has changed a lot. For my riding style it’s worse, but for overall performance the ’22 bike is better – for me I feel more uncomfortable, but the lap times are coming. But even at Phillip Island [where he missed victory by 0.186 seconds] the bike was shaking too much, which makes it more and more difficult to ride.
“We are trying to understand how to turn better. MotoGP is so close that as soon as you improve in one area you lose in another, but we are trying to understand the front tyre better and how to turn in a shorter time. In MotoGP if it takes a long time to turn the bike then you cannot you use the torque, so you’re losing tenths in the corner exits.
“I don’t feel like the bike is handling, it feels heavy. At circuits where you don’t have a lot of changes of direction and a lot of stopping, like Phillip Island and Losail, you can more or less manage, but as soon as you need to really stop the bike with lean angle, that’s where we are struggling.”
“Also, as soon as you have low grip, which used to be our strong point, you can’t do anything with this bike. We need to find a bike that’s constant. It’s like in the past, Ducati was very strong at some tracks and struggled a lot at others, but now they are fast at all racetracks, so we need to find a compromise and Honda is working on this.”
Márquez with HRC MotoGP technical manager Takeo Yokoyama
Honda
During the final races of 2022 the RC213V sprouted seat aero and ground-effect diffusers, to improve cornering grip. These technologies were first seen on Aprilia and Ducati MotoGP bikes. At the same time the RC213V was fitted with an aluminium swingarm made by Kalex, the German company that has dominated Moto2 for the last decade.
“The [Kalex] swingarm doesn’t give you more grip, but the information you get from slides is different and I like it,” added Márquez.
This isn’t the first time that Honda has swapped its own technology in favour of parts made by outside suppliers. In the past Honda GP bikes used Nissin brakes and Showa suspension. Both companies are owned by Honda. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Honda switched its factory NSR500s to British AP Lockheed and Italian Brembo brakes and in 2010 equipped its factory MotoGP machines with Swedish Öhlins suspension.
The man in charge of getting Honda back to the front is Takeo Yokoyama. We spoke with him at the season-ending Valencia GP…
Mat Oxley: another difficult year for Honda, your third in a row…
Takeo Yokoyama: In the past we used to be winning, but in the last three years actually we are used to losing. We always feel like we have reached the bottom of the situation but then we realise we are even lower. It’s incredible, but this is the reality. So definitely we are in the worst situation in HRC history.
Marc said the 2022 RC213V didn’t turn, have feeling or grip, but he also said the bike was better than the 2021 version, so how do you explain that?
Yes, I think the 2022 bike is better. The 2021 bike had some issues. With the 2022 bike we still sacrifice in some areas and not everything is fixed but totally speaking we are better now. I think if you look at the other manufacturers maybe they made fewer mistakes.
Márquez during the Valencia tests, watched by Bradl. The RC213V is fitted with Honda’s latest kit, including fairing diffusers, seat aero and Kalex swingarm
Red Bull
Marc’s crash at the start of 2020 coincided with the introduction of Michelin’s new rear slick, which made bikes quite imbalanced, so is finding the right balance particularly difficult now?
Yes, I think the [current grip] balance is the worst, but in the end it’s our job to adapt to whatever Michelin bring, so I’m definitely not here to blame them. That’s the philosophy of mono-tyre racing.
In order to do this we decided to make a big change from the 2021 bike to the 2022 model. We believe we made a step, because we are exploiting more from that high-level rear tyre than we did in 2021, but probably we’ve lost a little bit of the way to keep the same level of the exploiting the front tyre. This is where we are.
Talking to Marc’s team-mate Pol Espargaró this season he spoke about the rear tyre floating in corner entry, so is everything about the rear tyre now?
No, I wouldn’t say that. Of course, the rear tyre has so much potential that it’s a big part of winning and losing. If you cannot use the rear tyre’s potential in every phase – straight braking, going into the corner, mid-corner and corner exit, everything – you cannot reach the maximum potential.
It’s like this: in the past if you lost 10% of the rear tyre’s potential it wouldn’t make a big difference to your race result, but now 10% is huge, so you don’t want to lose anything.
At most races last season all the manufacturers were within 1% of each other on race-time performance. It’s so close that it must send your engineers a bit crazy?
Yes, for sure, we are going a bit crazy for this. On the one hand we are dead-last but on the other we are trying to believe that the gap to the top isn’t so far away. Again, we are talking small amounts, so if we can find a bit more performance I am quite confident we can catch up.
Espargaró struggling with rear grip at Sepang, chasing the Yamahas of Cal Crutchlow and Darryn Binder and chased by Fabio Di Giannantonio
Honda
What do you need from the bike to catch up?
If I knew the answer…
Which areas are your focus for 2023?
From 2022 to 2023 we won’t change the bike as radically as we did from 2021 to 2022, so I’d say that from now on we are making many refinements.
Would you say that MotoGP has reached that moment – with a maximum of five days of pre-season testing – that it’s no longer possible to radically redesign a bike?
This was our worry when we decided to make a big change from 2021 to 2022…
Oh dear, I’m in trouble with the factory Ducati team’s PR people for writing things they don’t like, so I’ve been blacklisted. Boohoo!
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Were you right?
Unexpectedly the first 2022 pre-season tests went OK, so we were quite confident, even though we had a much shorter time to reach the top level. But then the struggles started…
Why did the struggles start?
What you do in a test session is one thing. To make the final adjustments to the bike and for the riders to find the correct way to ride that track is another thing over a race weekend. Last season we were OK in pre-season testing but we lost our way trying to make the final adjustments to the new bike. We weren’t very sure how to do it, apart from the Qatar race, which was OK. But from the second race we lost our way a bit and we are still looking for the way.
What’s the most critical part of cornering at the moment? Getting the bike turned, so the rider can point it out of the corner, lift it up and open the throttle?
You have four parts to each corner: straight braking, going into the corner, mid-corner and then corner exit. Straight braking is one thing but going into the corner is the most critical point. Many times our riders complain there’s no traction out of the corner, so no acceleration, but then we realise the problem is in corner entry.
Sometimes Márquez did make the 2022 RC213V work – at Motegi last September he scored his first pole position in three years
Honda
Because if you enter and turn well you can lift up the bike and exit with grip?
Yes, you can lift up the bike, choose your line and go… Until last season our bike was missing rear grip, this wasn’t a secret. So the pure problem was the exit, so now we seem to have found a way to improve the corner exit, in pure traction, but to gain that traction we seem to have sacrificed going into the corner, with the front tyre.
How do you fix that?
It’s obvious we don’t clearly know the answer. Let’s say that until 2022 we seemed to understand better how to enter corners, so if we look at what we did in the past maybe we can find a solution.
Kalex have made a swingarm for the RC213V, so are they working with you on general chassis design?
No, just the swingarm.
Over the last two seasons we have seen Aprilia and Ducati develop ground-effect aerodynamics, which increase grip by sucking the tyres into the ground. It seems like the Japanese factories aren’t so keen to take this direction, but surely you have to if you want to win again?
Yes, we have to. You are right in saying that if you want to win in MotoGP nowadays we are forced to go this direction. The one clear reason why Honda is here is to make people happy all over the world, not only in racing, not only MotoGP riders, but everyone, by selling nice street bikes, so if we are forced to do something that’s impossible to be transferred to our street bikes then we aren’t very happy to do it.
KTM thinks the same but is now working with Red Bull Formula 1 aerodynamicists.
We have to do this, because, in a way, winning in MotoGP is one part of making Honda fans happy, so that’s why we are forced to do it. But especially from an engineering point of view it’s not a direct way to make people happy, because for us the direct way to make people happy is by making better street bikes, with technology.
So MotoGP and street bikes are diverging, like Formula 1 and street cars. The diffuser fairing that Marc started using at Phillip Island features smaller diffusers than Ducati’s, so how much difference do the diffusers make?
It’s just to control airflow, to make better grip and turning.
And do they improve performance?
Yes. Otherwise we wouldn’t use them – they give more grip and more turning.
Next year, MotoGP’s tyre-pressure rules will be enforced for the first time – will this be a big thing?
It’s something we need to be more careful about.
We know that some teams currently run the front tyre below the 1.9 bar limit and KTM’s MotoGP project leader Sebastian Risse told me that if you go much over 2.0 the rider crashes, so it sounds very tricky.
