Marc Marquez: Very demanding day, new aero ‘completely different’

Marquez said that the new high-downforce aero made his RC213V feel ‘completely different’, making the task of swapping back and forth even more complicated.

Nonetheless, having rebuilt confidence over the Silverstone weekend, Marquez ‘took risks’ to try and claim direct access to Qualifying 2 - only to be held up by former team-mate Pol Espargaro, leaving him 13th.

“It was a very demanding day on the mental side because, with this new aero, the way to ride the bike is completely different,” Marquez said. “I got used to the Honda for many, many years and especially last year and the first part of the season. And now with this aero, it was completely different.

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“I was so concentrated to try to take the benefit of this new aero and to adapt my riding style. Step by step I was able to do it.

“It’s true that I was the only Honda jumping from one aero to the other and this morning I did a few mistakes because the braking point is changing a lot, the way to approach the corner.

“This afternoon when I jumped to this new aero, my team, with Santi, did a good step and I started to feel better and better. So I decided to keep this new aero for the time attack.”

Unfortunately for Honda, while the new aero helps anti-wheelie, Marquez said acceleration remains a critical weakness.

“On the bike I feel too on the limit. And yeah, it’s a different approach to the corners, a different way to ride, but the main problems are the same. So that’s where we need to keep working.

“Acceleration is still one of our weak points, not because of the wheelie, with the new aero, but the spin.”

Marquez revealed that he had decided to sacrifice ‘a bit of the result’ in order to conduct the back-to-back fairing tests.

“In our box, we know from the numbers that the new aero should be better at this circuit. Because the stop-and-go and the wheelie and brake point is important here,” Marquez said.

“But even like this I prefer to sacrifice a bit the result and try to give good information to the engineers and for that reason, I made the back-to-back.

“Tomorrow I will have both bikes with the new aero, because here it has more performance, and then at the Catalunya circuit again we will go back-to-back to try to understand it in the fast corners.

“It's not the best way to achieve a good result, but I believe that is the good approach [for the future].

“Tomorrow will be the same, just push on the qualifying practice. On that lap, you can crash, but then the rest of the day just get information and try things.”

While Marquez feels in better physical and mental shape, he maintains he will keep things under control in the races.

“I arrived at Silverstone with low confidence after Assen, and I was struggling a lot about my physical condition. I had still not recovered 100%. Here I feel well about my physical condition,” he said.

“This is a big help already. And for that reason, I start to ride more aggressively, but riding like for example at the end of FP2 is not the way to ride all weekend. Because you will crash again 3-4 times.

“Single laps is where you can accept to take the risk - but not for the race distance.”

Nakagami, the only rider to use the new Honda fairing at Silverstone, was 18th, with stand-in team-mate Iker Lecuona 22nd and Marquez’s team-mate Joan Mir 23rd and last.