Pol Espargaro rode alongside Marc Márquez for two seasons – 2021 and 2022 – and learned a lot from him, especially in terms of competitiveness, as he himself considered. However, he quickly realized that the internal battle for the best results was intense, and that the way of working between Honda and KTM was (very) different.
In an interview with Motosan, the now KTM test rider, who returned to racing with the RC16 after two years with the RC213V, revealed some of his learnings with Márquez: ‘I learned to be more competitive. Marc is very competitive in every aspect. Being by his side is another level, because he takes competitiveness to the maximum expression within the box. That’s why the pre-season was very good’.
Afterwards, things changed and Espargaró realized that things at Honda were like a battle: ‘In Qatar, we were fighting in the first race and I managed to be ahead of him. And then I realized that it was a war; we had an unbelievable internal war. But I liked it. It was a very different environment from what I was used to at KTM’.
This led #44 to talk about some differences in the way Honda and the Austrian manufacturer work: ‘At KTM everything was transparent, but at Honda it was much more opaque, no one worked together, everyone followed completely different paths. For me, it was the wrong way to work. I come from a different work style, where we achieved incredible results by working together as a team’.
