In the first hour of MotoGP testing at Misano, Marc Marquez took the course, marking his return to the sport.
The four surgeries required to rectify a 34-degree misalignment in the right arm of the six-time premier class winner have kept him out of action for more than three months.
During the San Marino Grand Prix last weekend in Misano, he successfully completed two rides on a Honda CBR600RR Supersport motorcycle and was subsequently formally deemed fit.
Riding his Repsol Honda Team RC213V MotoGP bike, Marquez completed six laps on Monday, while Fabio Quartararo completed six laps on his Yamaha YZR-M1 ending up the fastest in the session.
The six-time MotoGP champion will likely return to racing, although this has not yet been confirmed. Following his fourth right-arm surgery, Marquez admitted that he was surprised by the raw power of a MotoGP bike. He had just recently been given the all-clear to begin working out.
“I only started in the gym two weeks ago, did two days on a bike and then straight to MotoGP! So the timing was quite tight and there is still a long way to go, but I feel good,” Marquez said. “I didn’t enjoy the first run because these bikes are too fast! But from that point on I started to enjoy it a bit more.”
“Still, after 100 days [away] you are riding mostly by instinct.”
“The bone is 100% fixed, so with the bone I feel perfect, it’s the muscles,” the Honda rider explained on his healing progress. “On the fracture area, I don’t feel any pain… but it’s more all the elbow and especially on the shoulder and on the back.”
“Honestly speaking, I was suffering [physically] more than enjoying this first day, but it’s sometimes like that even if you do a normal [winter training] and then arrive for the first day in Qatar.”
“These bikes are so powerful. You can be very fit but [on] the bike is different. Today everybody was super-fast because they are coming from a race weekend.”
“I just concentrated on the way to ride the bike and especially my position on the bike and it was not bad. So tomorrow we will try to do another step.”
The Spaniard completed 39 laps during the morning practice, with his best placing him 17th fastest overall and just 0.864s behind the leader, Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro.
“The lap time was not bad, but it was not the most important,” Marquez said. “The most important thing is that my body, my arm, accepted these 39 laps in a good way.”
“It’s true that I was doing very short runs and I was touching my shoulder, the arm, because the muscles were working in a different way for one year and a half.”
It took surgery in early June to repair Marquez’s right humerus’s 34-degree rotation, which had been causing the 29-year-old discomfort and mobility issues for that amount of time.
“Now all the muscles are working in the proper way, but they are not ready to hold all this torque, all this power of the MotoGP bike.”
Marquez’s two-wheel return on the CBR600 had taught him that the day following a ride may be the most physically demanding. As a result, his team requested that Marquez stays under the 40-lap limit in order to save his muscles for Wednesday’s final day of testing.
“Today the plan was 40 laps. I did 39 and stopped at midday. We did exactly the plan that we made, I asked, ‘maybe in the afternoon we can ride?’ But they stopped me because today is the first day and we try to ride tomorrow,” Marquez explained.
“Now I will have some special work with ice and physio, just to try to control the recovery of the muscles. The pain is not a lot, but the recovery of the muscles is important, and tomorrow if I have a good feeling [the plan] is to continue riding and if I can do more laps than today, I will.”
Technically, Marquez experimented with fresh aerodynamic updates since he hadn’t yet used his one permitted in-season fairing upgrade.
“Today and even tomorrow I will try to concentrate on the aerodynamic package because still I have one chance to homologate [the new fairing] on my bike and for that reason we are trying to understand,” he said.
“I felt a bit, but tomorrow is time to reconfirm because, after 100 days, like I say, you can be fast, but you don’t have the special feeling with the bike.”
“You cannot understand in a proper way but the good thing is that my comments were exactly the same as Bradl. So this means that we are in the same direction.”
The major objective right now is how Marquez’s body handles the strain of riding a MotoGP bike over the next days, particularly in light of a probable race comeback next time at Aragon.
“If today was a race distance, it’d be impossible to finish,” Marquez admitted. “I could do 10 laps in a row, but 27… I’m far to do.”
“It will be important to ride tomorrow and then understand on Thursday, Friday, how my body and the arm accepted and if I feel I’ve made a step forward – or maybe sometimes, after a big effort, you go one step back, because you start to feel some pain.”
