It’s time to take stock! Like every year for the past three years, Parlons MotoGP is embarking on a fairly important undertaking: taking stock of each driver at the end of the 2024 season, today, Luca Marini's turn. For a good part of the winter, we will go back through the rankings in reverse, to the point of talking in detail about the world champion's campaign. Are you ready? Here we go!
Here, we returned to the substitutes and other wild cards for this 2024 season.
A catastrophic balance sheet
Luca Marini is not helped by the statistics, to say the least. Arriving at Honda Repsol in disaster at the end of 2023, he started this year knowing perfectly well the difficulty of the task that awaited him. The golden-winged firm has been in decline since 2019and the top team has never been so fragile, even losing, two-thirds of the way through its season, its historic sponsor Repsol.
In this slump, Marini adapted poorly. After discovering MotoGP on a Ducati, he had never ridden anything else at the highest level. The fall was harsh. During the first eight Grands Prix, he did not score a single point. The Italian made up for it a little afterwards, and ended the season with 14 points, with, for best results, two twelfth places. No pole, no best lap in the race, no appearance in the top 9 in Sprint… a year devoid of success in every sense of the word.
Marini was not unworthy, in any case. Photo: HRC
It's not over: Luca has not scored a point on 13 occasions in 19 Sunday races. His fourteen pawns scored place him last of the starting drivers, seven units behind his teammate Joan Mir – I will come back to that –, and only two points ahead of Pol Espargaro who only did three weekends. It's not great, and it is, in fact, one of the worst individual seasons in history, doubled as the worst for a Honda factory rider since the advent of the MotoGP era in 2002. No regular driver has done less well since Darryn Binder in 2022 (12 points).
Not all negative
So, was he the worst student this year? In my opinion, not in the least. From the start, we felt he was very invested – even though he was infinitely far from the rest, several seconds from the middle of the stage – he assured that his mission would take time. Luca never tried to perform to the point of falling for an eleventh or twelfth place, unlike his teammate Mir. Following his plan to the letter, he worked to bring back as much information as possible to his engineers, never betrayed his philosophy and always wanted to be positive. I agree : It looks thin, but in any case, I am convinced that this is what Honda needs, much more than a Joan Mir profile. This is the first point.
Then we are forced to praise its regularity because
it fell very little this year. He suffered the fewest falls among all the starters, with only four occurrences (four times less than Mir). This makes another positive point in the context of a rebuild, because you must never forget that this is what Honda is all about.
Marini is one to watch. Photo: HRC
Third, it’s impossible to deny its progress. In reality,
he is one of those who have progressed the most throughout the year with, perhaps, Franco Morbidelli. In the end, he regularly got into the points, something that was absolutely out of his reach six months earlier. Certainly, the Honda RC213V was becoming better – also thanks to his own recommendations – But he happily surpassed Joan Mir, who has been riding this recalcitrant motorcycle since the end of 2022.
Conclusion
This marriage is not a failure. I find that the Zarco/Marini pair would be ideal for the Honda factory team, which will continue to progress if it relies on these two elements. Marini's example shows that numbers can be misleading. Taking context into account, his season isn't that bad. I would not be surprised to see it progress further in 2025, and, this time, bury Joan Mir permanently. But we will have the opportunity to talk about it again.
What did you think of Luca Marini this season?
Tell me in the comments!
Tomorrow, same time, we will return to the case of his teammate Joan Mir.
As a reminder, this article only reflects the thoughts of its author, and not of the entire editorial staff.
Cover photo: HRC
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