‘24 Honda is 8 kilos lighter; "we would very likely have retained Marc Marquez”

Repsol Honda reportedly think that their 2024 prototype bike is competitive enough to have kept Marc Marquez - but it arrived too late.

Team members believe that, if they could have delivered the developed bike at the September test in Misano, Marquez would not have quit, El Periodico report.

"We would very likely have retained Marquez and, without a doubt, we would have started to make up for lost time,” the report quotes an anonymous member of the team.

The prototype used at the postseason test was 8 kilos lighter, it is reported, a major advancement.

In Misano in September, Honda bosses in Japan and team manager Alberto Puig “decided to launch the design, construction and tuning of a motorcycle” with the intention of convincing Marquez.

But Honda staff feel Marquez made his decision to leave after being disappointed by the bike given to him at the September test.

His decision became official in October.

By the time Repsol Honda’s 2024 prototype was ready for the postseason test in Valencia, Marquez had already joined Gresini Ducati.

"Marc had been asking for two years for them to make a bike shorter and, above all, to slim it down, to take weight off and they never listened to him,” the report writes.

“And now, in two months, they design and build a new bike that, possibly, after testing it in the Misano test, would have made him doubt and perhaps, now, we would still have the best rider in history.”

Luca Marini replaced him and, along with Joan Mir, profited from the Honda which is being tipped as a major improvement from last season’s.

The new 2024 Honda is "totally new: it is lower, it has a new engine, suspensions, aerodynamics... it is completely new," the report cites sources from within Honda.

"Slimming a MotoGP bike down 8 kilos, in two months, is a titanic task, believe me."

The complete turnaround of a brand new bike in just two months is seen as proof of Honda’s power, and its potential to return to the front of MotoGP.

A separate source who has since left Honda reportedly said: "If you take 8 kilos off a bike in just two months, if you put your mind to it, you're capable of making a winning bike.

"Even if you don't do anything else to the bike, which they have, when you lose eight kilos of a MotoGP bike, the bike runs more, accelerates more and better, pulls a lot more, brakes less abruptly, lies down a lot more and, above all, it becomes a bike easier to ride, whatever the style is."