Honda loses to Yamaha at the Sachsenring: What it was due to

– In the duel of Japanese manufacturers in the MotoGP World Championship, Honda had to line up behind Yamaha at the race weekend of the German Grand Prix at the Sachsenring. Both in qualifying, the sprint (15 laps), and the Grand Prix (30 laps), Yamaha factory rider Fabio Quartararo had all four Honda riders under control.

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In the sprint on Saturday, all Hondas finished the race, but no world championship points were scored. In the Grand Prix on Sunday, two of the four Honda riders crashed out (Joan Mir and Cal Crutchlow), while the other two at least finished in the points (Luca Marini in 8th and Diogo Moreira in 11th).

“Compared to last year, we have made our motorcycle a little better, but it looks like everyone else has found even more,” says Luca Marini. The Honda factory rider praises Yamaha, especially Quartararo, for a good job: “Yamaha was a bit better than us throughout the weekend. We lost the ‘Japan Cup’ this time, but next time we will try again.”

The reason that Quartararo finished ahead of the best-placed Honda rider both in the sprint (9th) and in the Grand Prix (7th) is, according to Marini, not least the qualifying. “If we manage to start from a position like Fabio does, then we can beat Yamaha,” Marini believes.

“The problem is that Fabio put in an outstanding qualifying lap. That made the difference, especially in the sprint, on a track where overtaking is difficult,” says Marini, whose assessment is: “I think we are still ahead of Yamaha, but qualifying is currently not our strength.”

In the Sunday race over 30 laps, Marini was the best-placed Honda rider in 8th. In the sprint the day before, it was MotoGP rookie Diogo Moreira from the LCR team who led the Honda faction in 9th. On the way to this result, Moreira overtook Marini when braking for turn 1 “very cleanly and then brought it home,” says Marini.

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Moreira said after the sprint on Saturday that he “had difficulties finding the necessary grip, especially in the long left-hand corners. For one or two laps, it’s quite good, but the longer the race goes on, the more difficult it becomes.” Thus, the LCR Honda rider was initially able to keep up with Fabio Quartararo and Franco Morbidelli (VR46-Ducati) in the sprint, “but after a few laps, that was impossible.”

Joan Mir, teammate of Luca Marini in the Honda factory team, was far from Quartararo in the sprint. Instead, he fought with his teammate Alex Rins and was surprised. “That I ended up battling Alex at the end, I really did not expect. But I simply had no grip,” sighs Mir, speaking of a chain reaction.

“Turning was basically non-existent, grip neither. The grip disappeared very quickly for me, and then the rear tire started to overheat. This in turn caused the cornering behavior to get even worse because there was no grip at all. It was a consequence of not having a good package and not managing to get the tires to work properly,” is Mir’s analysis.

And Marini speaks of “standard” after 8th on Sunday, the best Honda result of the entire weekend. What does that mean? “We achieved what is currently the maximum for us. We have already seen in the entire first half of the season that more than 8th is difficult for us, if you exclude special circumstances.”

The problem Marini sees: “We really tried everything in the first half of the season. Every detail, every setting, simply everything we could touch, we tried. But in the end, the problems are always the same, the feeling for the rider is always the same. We have to get the engineers and the Japanese to provide us with some sharper parts for the future.”

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