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Marc Marquez Signs MotoGP Contract with Honda thru 2024

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Marc Marquez has signed an almost unprecedented new contract extension with HRC, which will see him remain in the factory Honda team for four more years after his current contract expires at the end of the 2020 season. That means Marquez will be a factory Honda rider until the end of 2024.

Marquez’s contract renewal had been widely anticipated, although the length of it is unexpected. It is a sign of the commitment of Marquez and Honda have to each other, and a clear indication of the reigning world champion’s objectives and intentions. Marquez races to win, individual races, but especially titles. He clearly sees Honda as his best bet for achieving that.

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MotoGP

Sepang MotoGP Test Preview: What Matters Most to Each Factory

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The start of the 2020 MotoGP season is now just a matter of hours away. The entire MotoGP grid will soon be rolling out at Sepang for the start of the first MotoGP of the year. Notably, it is the entire grid: unlike previous years, nobody has fallen of a motocross bike, minibike, or even a mountain bike and hurt themselves.

There is plenty to get excited about. We will soon be able to get a sense of the work done by the various factories over the winter, who looks like hitting their goals, who has found something extra, who is lagging behind.

We will see which of the rookies is off to a strong start, how last year’s crop of rookies is progressing, which of the veterans has made a step, either forward or backward, and which of the crop of title candidates is looking sharpest.

Yet a note of caution is advised. By Sunday night, we will have a timesheet showing who was fastest over the three days, and we will have a complete list of every lap posted by each rider (helpfully published by Dorna on the official MotoGP website, unhelpfully, in a format which is not easily extracted for analysis).

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WSBK

WorldSBK Releases Rev Limits for the 2020 Season

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To balance performance and make the championship more interesting, the rule makers at the WorldSBK series set maximum rev limits for all the entered bikes at the beginning of the season.

This usually isn’t much of a newsworthy event, but with the recent crop of superbikes hitting stratospheric numbers in their homologated street form, it is causing some interesting issues in the WorldSBK Championship.

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MotoGP

Repsol Honda Unveils the Same MotoGP Color Scheme as Always

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You have to give credit to the factory Honda MotoGP team, they are true pillars of consistency, and have shown a strong commitment to using the same livery over, over, and over again each year.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this…per se. Good branding scholars will tell you the value of an iconic and unchanged marque, and having the same design on their race bikes certainly makes it easy on fans.

However, when it comes to launching your team for the next season, it creates the problem of people asking, “why should we care?”

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WSBK

The WorldSBK-Spec Honda CBR1000RR-R with No Clothes

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The 2020 WorldSBK Championship has the promises to be one of the best in recent history, as there are more than a few contenders for the throne lining up on the grid this season.

Of course, there is five-time champion Jonathan Rea, who has been a juggernaut onboard the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10RR.

Rea will have the target on his back for 2020, that much is for certain, and the Kawasaki Racing Team has shown that they are well-honed operation, and certainly capable of adding metal to Rea’s trophy room.

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MotoGP

Marc Marquez Says His Recovery from Surgery Was More Complicated than Expected

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For the second winter in succession, Marc Márquez is recovering from shoulder surgery to fix a problem with dislocation.

It didn’t slow him down much in 2019, the Repsol Honda rider finishing the season opener at Qatar in second place, losing out to Andrea Dovizioso by just 0.023 seconds.

He went on to win the next race in Argentina by nearly ten seconds, and crashed out of the lead in Austin. It was to be the only time Márquez finished outside of the top two.

So when Márquez decided to have surgery on his right shoulder last November (in 2018, it was his left shoulder which was operated on), he was confident of a quick recovery.

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MotoGP

The Coming Storm: How MotoGP’s Silly Season Will Play Out

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As the MotoGP field prepares to spend the holiday season at home with friends and family – or in Andrea Iannone’s case, with his lawyers – the impending pressure of MotoGP Silly Season will be pushed to the back of their collective minds.

But with the contracts of the entire MotoGP grid plus the leading Moto2 riders up at the end of the 2020 season, that state of quietude will not last long. Silly Season has been temporarily suspended for holiday season, but it will soon burst forth in a frenzy of speculation, rumor, and signings.

So how will the Silly Season for the 2021 MotoGP grid play out? Given the number of changes likely, it will be a complex jigsaw puzzle indeed, with a few key players at the heart of the process.

And as a confounding factor, teams and factories will want to avoid the current tangle they find themselves in. The era of the entire grid being on two-year contracts is as good as over.

There are a number of reasons for no longer automatically offering two-year deals to everyone on the grid. Neither the team managers nor the rider managers I spoke to over the course of 2019 were thrilled at the prospect of another contract cycle like we have seen for the 2019 and 2020 seasons.

And the way the year has played out has given them plenty of reasons to avoid the same mistakes for 2021.

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MotoGP

Alex Marquez Will Race in MotoGP with Repsol Honda for 2020

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Repsol Honda has officially confirmed that Alex Marquez will partner his brother Marc at the Repsol Honda team for next year. It is the first time that a pair of brothers have raced in the same team in MotoGP.

There have been other brothers riding in the same class at the same time – Aleix and Pol Espargaro the latest example of that, but never before have brothers raced in the same team in either 500cc or MotoGP. 

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MotoGP

MotoGP Preview of the Japanese GP

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The first race of the flyaway triple header is arguably the most important. It is, after all, the home Grand Prix for half of the manufacturers on the grid. It is the one race where the top echelons of Honda, Suzuki, and Yamaha management gather, the people behind the companies which put 10 of the 22 MotoGP bikes on the grid.

If, for some sick and twisted reason, you wanted to destroy the Japanese motorcycle industry by removing its senior management, then the Motegi MotoGP race would be your second-best chance of success. Only the Suzuka 8-Hour race is a bigger deal for the Japanese manufacturers, and a more important race in Japan.

Motegi matters most to Honda. The Japanese motorcycling giant owns the circuit (as it does Suzuka) and it houses the Honda Collection Hall, a magnificent display of motorcycling history. As it is Honda’s 60th anniversary in Grand Prix racing, this year’s race is even more important.

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MotoGP

Marc Marquez: Where Does He Go From Here?

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What was impressive about Marc Márquez wrapping up his sixth MotoGP title in seven years was not so much that he took the title with a win (as outstanding as it was), but how he got there in the first place.

Márquez’s record after Thailand is almost unparalleled in the MotoGP era: 9 wins, 5 second places, and a single DNF. Márquez’s sole DNF came when he crashed out of the lead in Austin, a result of the engine braking problems the 2019 Honda RC213V suffered early in the season.

The only rider to have done anything like this before was Valentino Rossi in 2002. Then, in the first year of the 990cc four strokes, Rossi won 11 of the 16 races, and took 4 second places, with one DNF, caused by a problem with his rear tire.

It was Rossi’s third season in the premier class, a year after winning his first title aboard the 500cc two stroke Honda NSR500.

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