Márquez could have had a different season 'if he had won earlier'

The 2024 season allowed Marc Márquez to give new impetus to his career, with a return to the first step of the podium, third place in the championship and a contract signed with the official Ducati team. But did he have the potential to do even better? This is what Frankie Carchedi, chief mechanic of the pilot during his season spent at Gresini, seems to believe.

Speaking on the Crash.net podcast, the engineer felt that Márquez showed himself “quick entry” on the Ducati, which allowed him to quickly seem able to claim victory… but in the first half of the championship, a stone in the shoe complicated everything every weekend.

Márquez was sometimes disadvantaged by a distant position on the grid, sometimes in the lead but ultimately trapped, as in Austin, where he led before falling due to a brake problem, in the Jerez sprint, finished on the ground like very many drivers, or in the main race the next day, when he lost his duel against Pecco Bagnaia.

“It took time [pour gagner]especially at the start of the year”noted Carchedi. “Maybe if we hadn't started on the fifth row but on the third or second row, he might have been able to win earlier in the year. I remember Jerez quite well. Unfortunately, we crashed into a puddle during the sprint race while leading. It probably had a little effect, I don’t know, in the main race.”

Not winning at the start of the season may have deprived Márquez of a certain trigger on the Ducati, which would have been likely to trigger a positive dynamic: “Maybe things could have gone a little differently if he had won earlier, but we were also coming out of Austin, where we had a brake problem. It was important to see the arrival [à Jerez]. I think there were a lot of races where he could have started from a better place at the start of the year.”

In this first part of the championship, Márquez was still paying for his lack of knowledge of the Ducati and was unable to get the full essence of it, especially due to the limited riding time during the weekends. According to Carchedi, the Spaniard was simply “not ready”which was seen with his difficulties entering directly into Q2, thus complicating his weekends.

“To do a lap on the Ducati, he has a technique that you have to get used to to do the best and I don't think we did a lot of direct qualifying in Q2 with Marc in the first half of the year Then, the whole weekend was a story of coming back, it was complicated.”

“At the start of the year, we knew we had to be in Q2 so we could use three soft tires [en Essais]so there were only seven or eight laps left in FP2 to find the race settings.”specified Carchedi. “We weren't ready at the start of the year. That's the main thing that changed during the season.”

The way he believes it, I've never seen anything close to it.

Despite these periods of uncertainty, Marc Márquez has always placed total trust in Gresini, which Frankie Carchedi perceives as one of his main strengths: “He had great confidence in what we were doing and what we were trying. There was never the slightest panic, even at the start of the year, when we weren't in Q2, we was still able to do things well for Q2 and move forward.”

“It's always difficult with tires that can overheat [en étant en milieu de classement] but I would say that his greatest quality, forgetting all the technical side, is his mental approach. The way he believes in it, I've never seen anything close to it.”

Márquez gained little in automatics on the Ducati and achieved three successes in the second part of the season. He finished on the championship podium, behind two other Ducati riders, Jorge Martín and Pecco Bagnaia, who had a more efficient GP24 than his 2023 model. Márquez also beat two riders who had this newer version of the bike, Enea Bastianini and Franco Morbidelli, and Carchedi sees it as a major performance.

“Finish ahead of two [pilotes de la 2024] was pretty amazing. Currently, Ducati's engineers are so good… Every year, we say to ourselves that they can't progress and they manage to continue to improve the bike. All motorcycles have their advantages and disadvantages. There were just a few areas where it was hard for us to compete.”

“On one lap, I don't know what's on this bike, it's perhaps a question of experience: we're talking about a rider who was discovering the bike compared to riders who had four or five years on the same bike. […] There are differences [entre les motos]. The engineers are so good that they are making good progress, it's different every year. Sometimes it's one or two tenths, sometimes it's more, the differences are random.”