Luca Marini “really angry” at Honda exit rumours

An ‘angry’ Luca Marini has rubbished speculation that he might seek an early end to his Repsol Honda MotoGP contract.

The Italian, who joined HRC on a two-year-old deal in the aftermath of Marc Marquez’s departure, is yet to score a point in his opening five appearances on an RC213V.

But, quizzed on the report at Catalunya on Thursday, Marini categorically denied that he is re-considering his choice.

“This is something that makes me really angry,” replied Marini. “I don’t know why [but] someone put this news around for…I don’t know the words in English, but on purpose, to try and do something.

“I really trust in this [Honda] project. We have only had five races! We are really at the beginning and many things can change during the season because Honda is pushing, working a lot and bringing a lot of parts, big parts, every test.

“So I am really focussed here and satisfied about the job with them. It’s true that it’s hard because last year I was fighting for the podium in every race and now fighting for one point is tough.

“But I am really satisfied with all the people I am working with and we are coming better.”

Following Le Mans, Marini joined his fellow Honda race riders for a private test at Mugello, with some new parts expected to be used this weekend.

“It was quite positive I think and now we have to understand, after all the analysis and reports we have after the test, which part of the bike we have to put on the track tomorrow because we have different combinations and for the homologation of the aerodynamics we have to see,” Marini said.

“We don’t want to rush because the Japanese are working a lot and during the year we will have more upgrades and we need to be smart and clever to understand if something is clear, and is it is super-positive then we put it. If not then it is better to wait to have more upgrades because the gap to the first is quite huge at the moment.

“So we need steps that can help us to get closer. For sure we found good things [at Mugello] but for the lap time we did not improve so much. I expected a bit more, but OK, it is a process and we need to build things to get there in a better way.

“Also for the rider it is not so easy when you change everything, every run to find the limit. We need a little bit more time, me and Joan [Mir], to improve our lap-times and again find the limit of the bike.”

Marini agreed that Honda is now heading in the right direction after taking a step back at the start of this season.

“Everybody expects to start the season with better performance than last year…while we started even worse than last year,” he said. “For this, we lost some time and some months of development.

“But now we have come back on the right direction because it was clear for me from the first test in Malaysia. But we needed some time to come back to here.

“From this race maybe we can see something different but it is difficult to say if the performance will change after just one test in Mugello.”