A Marquez so “pissed off”, for a number of reasons (ailments, the bike that doesn’t work, love) and the disastrous results from Honda they are spreading rumors about an abandonment of MotoGP by the winged manufacturer. Rumors (for now) from the bar, such as those that said Rossi would abandon motorcycle racing at the end of the 2011 season. After all, it often happens that a manufacturer gives up a certain championship: Suzuki continues to do it (cross, SBK, MotoGP), even when he wins. Honda did it in the Dakar, in 1989, despite her having won the last four. Kawasaki and Aprilia have done it in MotoGP and the cause was precisely the lack of results. If Honda were to actually do it, it would be extremely humiliating, given the weight it has in this championship. He has always believed in it and has always wanted, spasmodically, to win it and to have the best bike of all. From 1983 to 2019 he won 11 titles in the 500 class and 10 in the MotoGP, with Spencer, Gardner, Lawson, Doohan, Criville, Rossi, Hayden, Stoner and Marquez. Something paradoxical is happening, but which I have seen repeated on other occasions. When, in a championship of any kind, there is an opponent who is too strong, who crushes all the others, forcing them to disinterest and give up the blow, the value of the Number One is diminished, which seems absurd. Why does it take over abandoned party syndrome, which works when there’s a party that seems like the center of the world, for the things it offers, the cool people who go there and the prestige that comes from saying “I was there”. But then it happens that the coolest ones leave. You stay at the party, but suddenly it seems diminished, maybe it wasn’t all this “praise”, since the best are leaving. It happened to me in the eighties, when me and the other kids on the block drooled over the “grown-ups” skateboarding tricks. It seemed to us the coolest sport on the planet, there were sidewalks full of kids doing crazy stunts. But then they switched en masse to motorcycles (today such a thing would be science fiction) and skateboarding, in my neighborhood, no longer seemed so phantasmagorical.
In the motorcycle field it means that if Ducati were to remain alone it would certainly be a victory for Italian technology over the rest of the world, but it would be useless if it no longer had worthy rivals to defeat. Similar situations have occurred in the past when KTM remained the only official manufacturer to participate in the Dakar (which has lost a lot of appeal) and when Ducati monopolized the Superbike, thanks to a regulation that gave it an advantage. This time Ducati is dominating without enjoying any advantage, but the story doesn’t change. However, Dorna knows these things well, because they saw what was happening a few years ago, when Honda was the bike to beat. They introduced a regulation that broke her back, making her “more like the rest.” We are therefore talking about new regulations for 2027, which should lead to less powerful and easier to manage MotoGP bikes.
