Stefan Bradl during the 2022 Spanish GP
One week after hosting the inaugural event of the Spanish Superbike Championship -with victories for Ivo Lopes and Román Ramos in the premier class-, the Circuito de Jerez Ángel Nieto will resume its activity with the start of two days of private testing in which all the MotoGP factories will participate with the exception of Ducati.
And it is here, in the south of Spain, where Honda will test the chassis that it has commissioned from Kalex for the first time. As reported by motorsport.com, the test team of the Japanese brand -now with Ramón Aurín at the helm- will be rolling on Monday and Tuesday of next week (April 10 and 11) with the aluminum frame that the company has been developing. German over the past few months, a chassis with which HRC wants to explore new paths after the problems its riders are experiencing with the 2023 RC213V.
As Marc Márquez stated in the Sepang test, This year’s bike feels a lot like the Honda they suffered so much with in 2022. In the Valencia test, HRC introduced a renewed chassis that did not fully convince the #93; that frame ended up in the hands of Alex Rins – who continues to race with him – while Honda worked over the winter on a new aluminum skeleton that Marc and Joan Mir were working on during the Malaysia and Portimao tests.
That chassis was finally chosen by the Repsol Honda Team duo to start the year in Portimao, a weekend that did not end well for the interests of the Japanese factory. The man from Cervera encouraged his team in the Sprint Race on Saturday with an unexpected third place, a joy that vanished 24 hours later when Marc rammed Miguel Oliveira and broke a finger on his right hand.
Joan Mir’s weekend in Portimao was nothing special either -he only scratched 5 points-, and a week later, in Argentina, the baggage gathered by the Repsol Honda Team is even more tragic: zero pointsas a result of the absence of Marc and the fall suffered by Mir in the short race on Saturday, forced to stay out of the main event on Sunday by order of the doctors.
The reality is that, after the dispute of two great prizes, Honda continues to sink in the manufacturer rankings; 20 points is all that its riders have managed to add, far from the 71 points that the reference brand of the moment, Ducati, has, and even less than Yamaha (27 points), which only runs this year with two motorcycles on the grid.
Turning to Kalex to explore new avenues is, perhaps, a desperate path to try to resume a path that Honda -be careful, the brand that sells the most motorcycles in the world- lost three years ago, coinciding with Marc’s injury; since his serious accident in Jerez, nobody has dazzled again about the RC213Vneither Márquez nor his brother Álex or a Pol Espargaró who, already at GASGAS, has recognized that the work dynamics found at Honda were not the most appropriate.
Will Kalex, a small company located in Bobingen made up of only eight workers, be able to get the largest motorcycle brand on the planet out of a quagmire? We will know the answer in a few weeks.perhaps at the next round of the championship in Austin (April 15 and 16)where Marc Márquez and Joan Mir could receive this new frame if Stefan Bradl’s conclusions are positive.
Read also: (Video) This is how Marc jumped with Álex Márquez’s podium: “I’m happy for my brother”
The German will ride with the Kalex chassis on April 10 and 11, and will do so sharing the Jerez track with other testers such as Dani Pedrosa (KTM), Lorenzo Savadori (Aprilia) and Cal Crutchlow (Yamaha); The plans of all the factories include preparing for the Spanish Grand Prix that will be held here in Jerez in just one month.