hi!! not sure who to ask but im a new motogp fan and trying to understand the honda history...why did the bike get so bad? online is saying mm93 sent engineers down the wrong path, or were just outdeveloped bc they were lax, or etc etc, but i cant tell how biased of an opinion that is from netizens and it's hard to dig for an objective answer.
as resident repsol honda connoisseur, do you have any thoughts on this? what were/are honda's problems (whether directly on the bike, or in terms of team management, or inner politics, etc.)? when did it really start? is there hope for joan and luca to develop the bike well and fight for titles again?
sorry for so many qs! and tyia even if it's just pointing me to the right direction of where to look for answers :))
Hi !!! Welcome to MotoGP :))) Okay, so Honda, Honda..... Where do I begin.....
It's really a series of all those things you mentioned. If people were paying attention, we have been having problems since as early as 2016 (!). So, really, a lot of people saw this coming. I recommend this article if you want a more articulate explanation, but basically, I would break it down into a few points here:
Marc and Dani were talented enough to mask those bikes' deficiencies and put them up there in places they didn't actually belong. And if it weren't broken enough, why fix it, right? Just managed some temporary solutions to at least keep the bike up and running and competitive enough until it isn't.
About Marc leading the team down the wrong path.... I wouldn't say it was intentional, but Marc was ridiculously insane on his own, and there were a lot of comments from other Honda riders about how his data makes no sense at all. But, he also was the number 1 rider at that moment, so it wouldn't be surprising that his input carried the most weight. And, really, Honda wouldn't be the first team in motorsports to build a bike or a car around their number 1 guy. So, when Marc's injury happened, well, all of the bike's flaws were exposed.
Honda and its engineers are really a bunch of old-school people (and I say that in the most respectful way possible). They are very principled in the way they build their bike. So, they were reluctant to change and adopt newer technology they didn't invent. In 2016, they were the last one to adopt a counter-rotating crankshaft. And don't get me started with aerodynamics. If they could, they would never put those aeros on their bikes. So, yes, they were probably the last ones adopting aeros.
Covid-19. This is probably a bit 50/50, considering every other team is affected by it. But since, most, if not all, of Honda engineers are based in Japan, it was really a major obstacle in development.
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Sorry they had Max Verstappen pointing to the Honda sign (like I almost bought a Civic off the big dick energy) and breaking every record known to man while appearing in their commercials and just being THAT guy…and they wouldn’t let RB out of having a Honda driver and then ditched them only to go to Aston and allow them to keep Lance?
Does not sit right with me.
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