• Motorcycling: What will the MotoGP World Championship be like in 2020?
  • Chronicle: Neither deconcentration wins Marc Márquez: victory in Cheste to close the year

They tell in Repsol Honda that Jorge Lorenzo communicated by telephone at the beginning of last week his intention to retire to the sports director of the team, Alberto Puig , and that, as soon as he hung up, Puig called another world champion: Emilio Alzamora , representative of the Marquez brothers. The exaggeration reduces the importance of the Japanese managers of Honda, who also participated in the decision, but underlines the determination of the team in the signing of Álex Márquez. Just three days after the announcement of Lorenzo's retirement, Repsol Honda made public on Monday the hiring of the recent Moto2 World Champion for the following season. The doubts about whether to sign with him, ascend from the satellite equipment to Cal Crutchlow or Takaaki Nakagami or renew Johann Zarco barely existed and the negotiation with Alzamora closed quickly. This Tuesday, in the tests that will take place in the same circuit of Cheste, the little one of the Márquez brothers will already climb for the second time to the Honda RC213V - he already tested it once in 2017 - and will be able to start calibrating the jump height to MotoGP.

Because despite the rapidity of the facts, the risk to both parties is high.

Honda is playing another year of problems in the garage attached to Marc Márquez and maybe something else, much more. After suffering the twilight of Dani Pedrosa , who barely added six victories in his last five years, and the misfortune of Jorge Lorenzo this season, the Japanese factory is put back in the hands of a pilot who does not know his motorcycle. While Crutchlow or Nakagami secured podiums and even victories, Álex Márquez is a face or cross bet. If it goes well, Honda could celebrate its first champion-runner double of the Marc Márquez era. If it goes wrong, the brand could end up facing its champion with what that implies. The formula of his signing, only for one season to match the rest of the grid, adds more danger to the stake because Álex Márquez will be required to present certain results from the first races. Its renovation for 2021 and 2022 will depend on a rapid adaptation to MotoGP and Honda.

And that is the part committed to the pilot himself. Álex Márquez pursues perfection in piloting, the perfect layout, does not live in the limits as his brother Marc and Honda is not designed for that style. As happened to Lorenzo, the Moto2 champion could find a machine too aggressive for its characteristics and suffer - even physically - when trying to tame it.

In your favor, the help you will find at home. Against him, the precedents. The first two years of Álex Márquez in Moto2, in 2015 and 2016, were a concatenation of mistakes and falls that almost ended his career. After dominating Moto3, the little one from the Marquez needed 31 races to get on a podium in the next category and seven more to celebrate his first victory. So yes, already in 2017, a path began that would end the title in 2019, but his team, Marc VDS, needed an extreme patience that Repsol Honda can hardly afford now.

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