Frankie Carchedi EXCLUSIVE: “If we had Marc Marquez’s first win earlier…”

Marc Marquez was ‘reborn’ during a make-or-break MotoGP season at Gresini, ending a three-year win drought with a trio of grand prix victories and securing a factory Ducati contract for 2025.

By his side this year was crew chief Frankie Carchedi, who previously guided Fabio di Giannantonio to a debut MotoGP victory with Gresini in 2023 and Joan Mir to the world title at Suzuki in 2020.

Speaking on an upcoming episode of the Crash.net MotoGP podcast, Carchedi explained Marquez’s adaptation to the Desmosedici: “Marc was fast immediately at Valencia. But when you’re testing, you can take everything in your own stride and work through your programmes.

“Even his race simulations at Sepang and Qatar were really good. The problem was more when we went back for the European rounds, you’ve got 20 laps, then you go into qualifying and we weren’t ready.

“There is also a technique to doing one [flying] lap on the Ducati to get the best out of it and I don’t think we made many Q2s directly in the first half of the year.

“So then the whole weekend was all about comebacks. It’s just how the [weekend format] is. It’s very difficult for someone in their first year [on a different bike] to just go ‘bang’ straight away.

“Whereas by the second half of the season, we made Q2 quite easily in general. And then the strategy [of the weekend] changes because you can work on your race pace and everything else for longer.

“That was the biggest thing that changed throughout the year.”

After finishing runner-up in five Sprints and three Grands Prix, Marquez finally broke his 1,000-day MotoGP victory drought with a perfect weekend in Aragon, round 12.

“Maybe things could have gone differently if we had his first win earlier,” Carchedi reflected.

“I remember Jerez quite well, unfortunately, we crashed on a wet patch in the Sprint whilst leading. And I know that had a little bit of an effect in the main race [when Marquez was beaten to a close second by Francesco Bagnaia].

“We were also coming back off Austin, where we had a brake issue [and crashed from the lead]. So it was important to finish.”

After Aragon, Marquez won again at Misano and Phillip Island on his way to third in the world championship behind only the GP24s of Jorge Martin and Bagnaia.

But Carchedi also picked out less obvious highlights, such as the #93’s performance through the fast right-handers at the season-ending Sepang and Barcelona events.

“We know Marc’s always found the fast right-handers more difficult than the lefts,” Carchedi explained, “but we do what’s called median analysis, which is race pace analysis. So not just your fastest sector but your average.

“Sepang and Catalunya are probably the two tracks he detests the most! And we were actually fastest in the last sector over the Catalunya race, which is purely fast right-hand corners. And the same in Sector 1 at Sepang, which is the very fast turn 3.

“So for us, from where we started, that was really good from a personal point of view well. Because from something that he struggled with or didn’t like, he became the most competitive.”

The full Crash.net MotoGP podcast with Frankie Carchedi will be live on Monday.