Marc Marquez is to miss the Algarve Grand Prix, to be held at the Portimão circuit this weekend.
According to a press release from the Repsol Honda team, the Spaniard suffered a crash during training which has left him with a mild concussion.
As he was still feeling unwell a couple of days after the event, Marquez and the team have decided to skip the penultimate round of MotoGP.
Marc Marquez has had a rough 2021 so far. Since his return from the injury, which kept him out of MotoGP for almost the entire 2020 season (the only exception being Jerez, where he sustained the fractured humerus in the first race, and overstressed the first plate inserted to fix the bone during practice for the second), he has struggled.
His record: ten race starts, six crashes (one each at Mugello, Barcelona, Austria and Silverstone, and two at Le Mans), and twelfth in the championship with just 59 points.
Of the six races where he has been classified, he has finished fifteenth, ninth, eighth, seventh twice.
It’s race week again. For both the MotoGP and WorldSBK paddocks, with the World Superbike series also making its debut at a new track, the Autodrom Most in the northwest corner of Czechia 55 km south of Dresden and 75km northwest of Prague, and which looks on paper to offer a nice, varied array of corners and challenges.
But WorldSBK at Most (be ready to be drowned in a tidal wave of superlative-based puns) comes after just a single weekend away, the production-based series having raced at Assen two weeks ago.
MotoGP is back after its longest summer hiatus in recent memory, a whole five-week absence from racing.
Episode 217 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this show covers the MotoGP action from the German GP at Sachsenring.
On the mics, we have David Emmett and Neil Morrison, and they are joined by two esteemed MotoGP photographers, Cormac Ryan-Meenan (CormacGP) and Rob Gray (Polarity Photo).
Since the beginning of the season, the media has been buzzing with HRC’s tales of woe. After seven rounds, the factory sits fifth in the manufacturers championship, 91 points behind Yamaha and Ducati (who are tied for first place), and just 10 points ahead of Aprilia.
To put that into perspective, all four Honda riders – Marc Márquez, Pol Espargaro, Alex Márquez, and Takaaki Nakagami – have contributed to Honda’s total of 52 points, while Aprilia’s stopgap second rider, promoted tester Lorenzo Savadori, has added just a single, solitary point to Aprilia’s total, Aleix Espargaro having scored the other 44.
The situation for the Repsol Honda team is, if anything, even worse.
After a month in the desert, MotoGP returns to something more resembling normality. The Grand Prix paddock has left Qatar behind to fly to Europe, gathering at the Circuito do Algarve in Portimão, Portugal.
The change is all-encompassing: from the wild temperature swings from day to night of Qatar to the temperate climes of Portugal’s Algarve coast in balmy springtime; from dust and wind to mist and sunshine. From the bright artificial spotlights to being bathed in natural sunlight.
Above all, though, the change is from having a narrow window where everything resembled race conditions, that golden hour from 7pm to 8pm, to having usable conditions both morning and afternoon.
From a track where Michelin couldn’t bring a selection of tires which would allow a choice for the race at night, to a track where the teams should be able to find a tire that works for their bike, instead of having to bend their bikes to suit the only tire that will withstand the the weird conditions that prevail in the Qatari night.
Not that tires won’t be an issue at Portimão. Last year’s allocation has been tweaked, based on data collected at the track when MotoGP visited for the first time.
And because we go there now in mid-April, rather than late November, when the sun is higher in the sky and radiating more heat into the ribbon of asphalt the riders have to traverse.
Can Marc Márquez win the championship this year? Has he left his return too late to catch up? How fast will he be on his return to MotoGP at Portimão?
The answer to all of these burning questions is “we don’t know”, but that doesn’t stop us from asking them. And from trying to make our best guess at what might have happened by the end of the year.
The normal build up to a MotoGP weekend sees the teams and riders spend FP1 figuring out which tires they think will work, then FP2 working on setup and then chasing a preliminary spot in FP2, leaving themselves plenty of work for Saturday, especially in FP4. But, Qatar is not a normal weekend.
For a start, MotoGP arrives here after a total of five days of testing (well, four days, strictly speaking, as the last day of the test was lost to strong winds and a sandy track). Setups have already been found, tires have already been chosen.
The preseason is over. Preparations have been made, new parts tested, bikes, bodies, and brains readied, though not necessarily in that order. MotoGP is on the verge of starting another brand new season.
There was less to develop, test, and prepare this year, the aftermath of rules imposed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic introducing freezes on engine development and limiting aerodynamic updates.
The four factories who did not have concessions in 2020 – Ducati, Honda, Suzuki, and Yamaha – will all be forced to use the engines they homologated for their riders last year for the 2021 season.
KTM, who lost concessions thanks to a phenomenally successful season which included three victories, has been allowed to design a new engine for 2021, but must freeze it at the first race in Qatar.
Aprilia, the only remaining factory with full concessions, will be allowed to continue to develop their engine throughout 2021, and will have nine engines to last the season, instead of the seven the other factories have to try to make last the year.
In terms of aerodynamics, things are a little simpler: the riders can either use their 2020 aero package, or they can introduce one upgrade aero package at any time during the season (including at the first race).
And of course, aerodynamics packages are applied per rider, rather than per manufacturer.
The 2021 MotoGP season will kick off without six-time MotoGP champion Marc Marquez.
After review by the medical team monitoring his recovery from the broken humerus he suffered at the opening MotoGP round of 2020, the decision has been made to postpone a comeback until after the two Qatar rounds.
Marc Marquez took a major step closer to a return on Tuesday. The Spaniard rode a full-sized production bike – a Honda RC213V-S street bike – at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo.
It was the first time he had ridden a big bike since pulling out of the Andalusian round at Jerez during his precipitate return after his first crash.