SECRETS OF HONDA’S WINNING MACHINE
Honda won both rider and constructors titles with its mighty 270bhp RC213V
Did Honda win the 2018 MotoGP crown or was it Marc Marquez? A bit of both, of course. Man and the machine are made for each other: a bit wild and on the edge. It takes a rider with the aggression of Marquez... or of Cal Crutchlow – to wrestle the best out of the RC213V.
And yet Honda have worked hard over the past three seasons to make the RC213V work better with the Michelin tyres and lower-tech unified software, so they’ve made the bike more neutral, with a big-bang firing order to improve traction and reverserotating crank to reduce wheelies. “This year we tried to improve our bike to be competitive on all track layouts,” explains Marquez. “Now we are stronger in what were our weak points but also we suffer a bit more in what were our strong points.” More horsepower was the biggest improvement for 2018, because HRC knew they needed more acceleration and speed to stop Ducati stealing the title. “We set a very high horsepower target, which was hard to achieve but now the power is much bigger,” says HRC director Tetsuhiro Kuwata. The 90-degree V4 makes close to 270 horsepower. By Aragon in September, Marquez’s speed deficit to the Ducati had shrunk to 0.7mph, compared to 2.5mph in 2017. Marquez knows what he likes and he doesn’t like messing around with chassis design too much, because the way he rides he needs to know what the bike will do before it even does it. At the end of the year Honda won its 24th premier-class constructors title. The next most successful brand is MV Agusta, which won its 16th and last title in 1973!
1 Tyre’s the limit
The RC213V’s biggest handicap is that it nearly always needs Michelin’s hardest front slick, which can make life risky for riders, especially in the early stages of a race before the tyre’s fully up to temperature. “We are still analysing why we work the front tyre so much,” says Marquez who often crashes because he’s using the hardest front tyre. “With the hard tyre you can go faster but you get less warning, because the tyre is stiffer. If you can use a softer tyre then you can feel the limit better.”