Before getting on a plane to Portimao, Marc Márquez attended COPE’s El Partidazo program to talk about the 2023 MotoGP World Championship season that will start in just a couple of days in the south of Portugal. The Portuguese track will open the most demanding school year of the year in sporting terms for drivers and teams, nine frantic months of competition that will lead the Continental Circus to visit a total of 21 circuits to play a whopping 42 races.
And it is that this year, as a great novelty to try to attract the attention of the public, Dorna has introduced sprint racing, a format that already existed in WorldSBK and in the Formula 1 World Championship and now reaches the premier class of the Motorcycle World Championship, with its first 12-lap race scheduled for this Saturday in Portimao starting at 4:00 p.m. late Spanish peninsular time.
Márquez believes that this short race “it will be interesing” for fans, “one more point of encouragement for the weekend”, although he also warns of the danger that Dorna runs of overloading drivers and teams with a calendar that does not stop growing and that now, in addition, has seen the number of races double: “Perhaps for teams and drivers the format of 21 races, plus the sprint races, then on Fridays… because now on Fridays in theory it says Free, but they are not, they serve to classify you on Saturday. It is a very demanding format, Dorna said it in his day, that in the future he does not rule out delimiting or modifying this new format. Because we are human, and the demand has to be dosed to avoid dangerous situations on Saturday“, says the Catalan.
The arrival of the Sprint Race is one of Dorna’s responses to the decline that the championship has suffered in terms of tracking; with a youth audience increasingly disconnected from motorbikes and pay-per-view broadcasts of races, the MotoGP organizer is looking for formulas to engage more fansa gesture that Márquez appreciates.
“MotoGP is in a difficult moment”, admits #93 in reference to the following that the championship has around the world. “You can speak openly. You have to attract people, because Dani Pedrosa, Jorge Lorenzo, Valentino Rossi have withdrawn, I have been injured for two years… and a bit of interest has been lost”.
The 30-year-old pilot insists that the task of winning followers does not depend solely on the organization led by Carmelo Ezpeleta: “You have to work, each team, Dorna, the pilots… not only Dorna. The pilots, together with professional teams, they have to work to get people’s attention, and for people to come and have fun. For example, I have created a grandstand in Jerez with a DJ, animation… there is also an area in the city, which the City Council has helped us with, so that the weekend grows. They will take the six motorcycles out of the Cervera museum, it will be called Garage 93, you will be able to eat, a bit of a party”, resume Marc.
Moving on to a more sporty plane, Marc Márquez appreciated the news released a week ago by Speedweek.com about the new Honda chassis that Kalex is working on. The German company began to collaborate with HRC in the middle of last year, supplying the Japanese factory with a new aluminum rear swingarm which met the expectations of its pilots, and in view of the success of this partnership, in Japan they seem to have abandoned their usual ‘do it all’ policy and have entrusted Kalex the construction of a new chassis for the RC213V that we could see in the month of Mayor, on the occasion of the official test in Jerez.
Questioned about this matter, Marc has claimed to be completely unaware of the news: “That, I promise you for my mother that I love her very much, the first news that reached me was through the press. In the box… maybe it’s in charge and I don’t know it, but in the box no one has told me that there is a chassis in charge”.
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Cervera’s does not hide that Honda “is working on the chassis” to find solutions to their current problems -which are not few-, and recalled what happened in the test in Portugal two weeks ago: “For example, in the Portimao test two weeks ago, A chassis made by Honda arrived, and it was tested. There were negative points and other positive ones, but the fact that a chassis is being made with Kalex, I don’t know about this news”sentenced the Spanish.