Will HRC run a riderless team in MotoGP next year? Paddock insiders say yes!
With Honda’s MotoGP bike not just slow but extremely dangerous, and all of their riders having deserted, everybody assumed they would pull out of MotoGP altogether in 2024. However, we have it on good authority that HRC have hit upon a novel solution: running a zero-rider team.
We caught up with our secret Honda source for an in-depth interview.
Why are you considering a zero-rider team for next year?
Every single Honda MotoGP rider has run screaming for the harbour. Theoretically we can stop Marc Marquez escaping, but even if we do he’s unlikely to get through pre-season testing without the RC213V either snapping his arm back off or scaring him so much that he claims to have gone crosseyed again.
Don’t MotoGP rules force you to run a 2-rider team?
There exists a loophole. If our two regular riders get injured we technically don’t have to replace them for a couple of rounds.
Regular riders? Never mind signing a contract to start 42 races on the Honda RC213V, nobody even wants to sit on a rolling chassis in the garage to take selfies in case it suddenly fires them over the handlebars and breaks their ankle in 3 places! Where on earth will you find regular riders?
HRC has a vast number of random Japanese test riders. We’ll sign a couple of them up as regular riders then at the last minute we’ll claim that they can’t compete because they burned their top lip on a steaming hot bowl of noodles, or got a splinter in their throttle hand from a poorly manufactured chopstick. Something convincingly Japanese. After a couple of rounds we’ll replace them and do the same again with the new riders, so we’ll never actually have any riders on track at all.
Surely you’ll run out of random Japanese test riders eventually?
After we bring in a new pair of random Japanese test riders half a dozen times even David Emmett will get bored and stop asking us about them. Then we just start making up random Japanese-sounding test rider names like Fuji Tamagotchi and claim they once finished 23rd in the Suzuka 8 hour for a team called Ultimate Noodle Spacehopper or whatever. It doesn’t really matter as they’ll be conveniently injured at the last minute and unable to race anyway.
Honda pulls out of F1 all the time, so why not just pull out of MotoGP?
Formula One and MotoGP very different. F1 is incredibly boring and there’s no overtaking because of the stupid aerodynamic rules.
Hmmm… Anywaaaayyy… Will development of your RC213V MotoGP bike continue?
Continue at full pace! We still need to train up young Japanese engineers for our lawnmower and outboard motor divisions. HRC already have a team of 28 engineers researching the best ways to construct shoddy “Get Well Soon” signs out of slightly crumpled sheets of A4 paper, a bit of masking tape and whatever kind of pen or pencil they happen to find kicking around the screwdriver drawer in the toolbox.
Is that really a good use of Honda’s multimillion dollar engineering resources?
Our Technical Resource Committee and Materials Research Committee are urgently looking into this question. They plan to send the first draft of a joint preliminary report to the Technical Efficiency Committee as soon as late February.
Cutting it a bit fine for the 2024 season isn’t it?
Most un-Japanese to proceed otherwise.
Cheers for the scoop.
It was a pleasure.