Marc Marquez finishes a Sunday race: 'Like a joke, but it’s the truth!'

Marc Marquez admitted that taking until round 10 to score his first Sunday points of the MotoGP season, ‘looks like a joke’.

Peter McLaren

20 Aug 2023

Marc Marquez, MotoGP race, Austrian MotoGP, 20 August

But twelfth place at the Red Bull Ring was the first time Marquez had reached a chequered flag in a 2023 grand prix, having missed five races due to injury and crashed out of the other four.

“Yeah, looks like a joke, but it’s the truth! It's the first time that I finish the race on Sunday and the first points of the season on Sunday,” Marquez said.

“Basically, it’s easy to understand. I mean you just approach the race in another mentality [not to override], the same as I did in Silverstone. OK, Silverstone [I crashed], but it was more a race incident, not from riding over the limit.

“Today just I go out with that soft rear tyre and step by step I got my rhythm. I pushed in the middle of the race a bit more because I saw that the feeling was good. Then in the end as we expected the tyre dropped quite a lot, but it was acceptable.”

Prior to Austria, Marquez's only points of the season came from the Sprint races at Portimao (3rd), Le Mans (5th) and Mugello (7th).

The eight-time world champion finished twelfth in Saturday's Red Bull Ring Sprint.

Marquez made steady progress from 18th on the grid on Sunday, finishing as the top Honda but 23 seconds behind race winner Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati).

“Of course, I'm not happy to finish 23 seconds behind the first guy. We cannot be happy and it's not my mentality. But in the end, we need to approach the races in a different way,” he said.

“I was trying not to make any mistakes and do the race distances. It's a difficult approach for a rider like me but it's the only approach because if not we see with this bike, at the moment, when you don't feel well and you try a bit more, it's easy to have a mistake [and crash] like yesterday with Nakagami and today with Joan Mir.”

Austria was Marquez’s first weekend with the new high downforce Honda aero but the RCVs rear grip issues continued and he tried major set-up changes right up until the race.

“We tried many, many things during this weekend. Every run was a different bike. Like this morning was a massive change and for that reason, I was last in the warm up, but we understood that was not the direction,” Marquez explained.

“Then for the main race was a small change, a bit better, but in the opposite direction than warm up. So step by step we are trying to analyse because with this new aero also the bike is completely different.”

Marquez is 19th in the world championship, with 19 points.