Pol Espargaro rode alongside Marc Marquez for two seasons – 2021 and 2022 – and by his side he got to learn a lot, specially in terms of competitiveness as he himself considered. He also address some differences on the way Honda and KTM work.
On an interview with Motosan, the now test rider for KTM, who returned to racing with the RC16 after two years with the RC213V, revelead some of his learning with Marquez: ‘I learned to be more competitive. Marc is very competitive in all aspects. To be next to him is another level; because he takes competitiveness to the maximum expression inside the box. So, the pre-season was very good’.
Then things changed in the way Espargaro noticed how things among Honda because like a battle: ‘In Qatar, we were fighting the first race and I was able to be ahead of him. And there I realised that it was a war; we had an unbelievable internal war. But I liked it. It was a very different environment to what I was used to in KTM’.
This led the #44 to speak of some differences in the way Honda and the austrain manufacturer work: ‘At KTM it was all transparent, but at Honda it was much more opaque, nobody worked together, everybody went completely different ways. For me, it was the wrong way of working. I came from a different style of working where we got incredible results working together as a team’.