After a decade with Repsol Honda, Marc Márquez will be with an independent and European team for the first time in his MotoGP career this year. The differences are many and at various levels.
The six-time champion of the premier class explained that, more than the culture itself, the biggest distinction is between being a factory team and a satellite team, considering the job requirements:
– More than Italians and Japanese, it’s about being a factory and not being a factory. In a factory team, you have several things to test and you need to understand the way of riding, you need to be very focused because it is necessary to be very precise in the comments as it will be the development of the bike. At the moment, I am simply in another situation: I focus more on learning how to ride this bike. Of course, the information is not flowing in the same way with the technicians and mechanics because I worked 12 years with the other team. But of course, Honda is Honda, it is HRC, and I have enormous respect for them.
When it comes to culture, Márquez does not deny that it is very different, but he considers that there are similarities in the way it is necessary to work: ‘It is the Japanese culture and a factory team, and it is a private, family team, and Italian culture. So, it is completely different, but in the end, the way of working, the way of being precise and planning the test, if you want to fight at the top, it is one way and it is trying to have everything at its best‘.
